Enfant terrible of American theatre, Tennessee Williams, challenged many social norms in both his writing and how he chose to live his life openly as a gay man. Over the past 50 years, a range of unforgettable characters created by him have been essayed on stage and screen by the best of Hollywood and British actors. Who can forget the steamy tangles of Marlon Brando and Vivian Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire or Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman in Cat on A Hot Tin Roof, Anna Mangani in The Rose Tattoo, Ava Gardner and Richard Burton in Night of the Iguana or Katherine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly Last Summer?
The Indian stage has seen numerous productions of his play, in English, in translation and in adaptation. The Glass Menagerie was also a part of the Old World Theatre Festival recently, and it is performed often with A Streetcar Named Desire.Most contemporary stage productions pale before these cinematic creations. But that is not the case with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a production of National Theatre, London, recently seen in an online live telecast at India Habitat Centre, Delhi.Set within a burnished bronze interior, the set consists of only a black bed and a black dressing table.
At frequent intervals, the bronze walls light up with the fireworks that are exploding to celebrate Big Daddy’s birthday. This loud, dominating patriarch—owner of 284-acre land in Deep South—is the nerve centre of this script. As the play progresses, we learn he has cancer and the question is of succession. The preferred son, Brick, is not only a complete alcoholic but he is also laid up with his leg in a cast. Father and son spar with one another—two generations, two ideologies and the big question: Is Brick gay? Will he produce an heir?
On the fringe are other family members: Big Mama, Brick’s wife, brother and wife and their five ‘no neckmonsters’, five daughters. The production steers away from what could easily turn into melodrama. At key turning points, almost like music, the five children run in with firecrackers in hand, and line up at the back of the stage. Their excited shrieks, their cries and the amplified sound of sizzling crackers, serving as a counterpoint to the tragedy of father and son locked in battle on the raised platform in front of them.
By the end of the play, the grey carpet is strewn with remnants of Big Daddy’s birthday cake and a hundred ice cubes that Brick hurls across the floor when his wife hides his liquor. In this debris of civilisation, the director mounts an almost primeval ending as Brick and his wife strip completely, two naked bodies preparing to mate like Adam and Eve, as the burnished set blazes brightly for a brief while, before the image disappears into the darkness. A seminal work of the 1950s seen through the prism of contemporary sensibilities.The writer is a Delhi-based theatre director.feisal.alkazi@rediffmail.com