Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
by Tennessee Williams
Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz Berlin
Her Majesty’s, Adelaide. March 11.
Until 16 March.

Since one of the highlights of Brett Sheehy’s 2006 Adelaide Festival was Nora, the theatrically inventive re-framing of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House by Berlin’s Schaubuhne Theatre, the company’s scheduled return this year with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has created high expectations and a great opportunity for festival audiences not only to renew the connection with director Thomas Ostermeier’s work but to build on it.

Set on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta, Tennessee Williams’ play is a family drama of mythic dimensions. Ruled over by the self-made Big Daddy (part King Lear, part Zeus, part Dr Phil) is his compliant wife Big Mama and two sons, the obedient but despised Gooper and the prodigal Brick – alcoholic, and sexually and spiritually inert. Also present are their very contrasting wives the grasping Mae, with her bratty “no-neck” children, and Maggie, the restless, frustrated cat on the hot tin roof.

In this Schaubuhne production the stage design has many of the familiar Ostermeier signatures – the plantation house is a high wall of black framed glass (through which we often see the performers in strongly lit tableaux) with low slung retro-modern lounges at centre stage. Instead of the huge aquarium which featured in Nora, reminding us that the heroine was a fish out of water, here, high above the action, in a glassed-in eyrie, set on a horizontally suspended tree bough, is a large buzzard-like bird, apparently presiding over the flailing human events below.

While there are interesting updates in staging – Brick (Mark Waschke) sulkily channel surfs TV as he drinks, Maggie (the excellent Julie Bowe) prowls the room in red lingerie while Led Zeppelin’s Baby I’m Gonna Leave You blares out – this adaptation has leached from the play the very vitality it needs to make it work. In the original text, as if drowning in bad faith, Brick refers repeatedly to
disgust and mendacity (here, the peculiar word “strategize” is used in the English surtitles) His battle is with his father but they also understand each other. Brick’s repressed sexual feelings towards his dead friend Skipper are drawn out by his father as if he were a therapist or a redeemer. As Big Daddy, Josef Bierbichler sometimes hits those powerful chords but not often and, when Brick, the hero who would be neither scion nor sire, weeps at the end, the audience is almost bewildered.

Where the contemporary setting revitalized Nora and gave it an urgent satiric dimension, here, in its ironic distance, and languid under-performance, profound oppositions are reduced to cake fights and anguish to mere petulance. The play has been deconstructed but not revealed.

Murray Bramwell

“Woolly deconstruction of a cotton-picking classic”, The Australian, March 13, 2008. p.10.