KEY POINTS:
Fifty-three years after the Broadway premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Auckland Theatre Company's revival of the American classic eloquently affirms that Tennessee Williams still matters.
The production opens in grand style with Johnny Cash singing Bird on a Wire while a blaze of red light plays across the translucent surfaces of Tony Rabbit's dazzlingly beautiful set. The ambience is a million miles from the original Dixieland setting but the combination of world-weary melancholy and sumptuous luxury sets the right tone for the play's ruthless dissection of the all-American family.
The production shifts the focus away from the iconic characters of Big Daddy and his alcoholic son Brick and seems to suggest that Brick's long-suffering wife, Maggie the Cat, is the real hero of the piece.
Toni Potter's superb performance as Maggie powerfully justifies this interpretation.
While the other characters wallow in self-pity and various forms of neurosis, Maggie is consistently clear-sighted, resourceful and optimistic. Potter captures Maggie's fierce determination as well as her desperate loneliness and animates the role with a razor-sharp wit.
By contrast, Gareth Reeves' Brick is a thoroughly useless drunk. There is a tendency to romanticise Brick's drunkenness as a heroic protest against the mendacity that surrounds him, but in Reeves' portrayal Brick is deeply implicated in the hypocrisy and his high-sounding pursuit of "one pure true thing" comes across as just another alcoholic evasion.
Stuart Devenie's Big Daddy shows the grand patriarch as an unfeeling bully but one of Tennessee Williams' great qualities is his ability to show sympathy for his less-lovable characters and Devenie movingly evokes the frailty of a man discovering that wealth and power offer no defence against the onset of cancer.
Alison Quigan also strikes the right note with her lively portrayal of Big Mamma struggling to come to terms with the cruelty of those she loves.
There are no redeeming qualities in the Gooper family, who unambiguously represent greed and hypocrisy, but finely judged performances by Paul Glover and Jacque Drew remind us that there is a special skill in playing such truly rotten characters.
Colin McColl's direction effectively preserves the ambiguity that is at the heart of Williams' art and refuses to settle on any singular answer to the play's haunting questions. He also finds humour by emphasising that the all-consuming personal traumas are utterly meaningless to the uninvolved minor characters who make hilariously timed interruptions as the drama builds to a crescendo.
If I had any quibbles it would be over the use of accents - the modernised setting demonstrates that the play does not depend on the faded grandeur of the South and the southern drawl lends a faint tone of artificiality to performances that are often breathtakingly real.
