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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Belvoir presents Cat on a Hot Tin Roof By TENNESSEE WILLIAMS Director SIMON STONE This production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened at Belvoir St Theatre on Wednesday 20 February 2013. It transferred to Theatre Royal, Sydney, on Wednesday 10 April 2013. Set Designer ROBERT COUSINS Costume Designer ALICE BABIDGE Lighting Designer DAMIEN COOPER Composer & Sound Designer STEFAN GREGORY Associate Sound Designer CAITLIN PORTER Stage Manager EVA TANDY Assistant Stage Managers MEL DYER & SARAH STAIT Production Manager GLENN DULIHANTY With Big Mama LYNETTE CURRAN Reverend Tooker GARETH DAVIES Gooper ‘Brother Man’ ALAN DUKES Brick EWEN LESLIE Margaret JACQUELINE MCKENZIE Mae ‘Sister Woman’ REBECCA MASSEY Big Daddy ANTHONY PHELAN Dr Baugh JUSTIN SMITH Children RUBY ALEXANDER, ALEX CHORLEY, OSCAR CLARKE, BONNIE FITZGERALD, ELLA NICOL & NATALIE THEODORE Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is presented through special arrangement with The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. PRODUCTION THANKS Kate Englefield; Faran Martin; the children’s chaperones: Lawrence Ashford, Rebecca Hitch & Keir Wilkins. PhotoGraphY Heidrun Löhr DESIGN Alphabet Studio BEwen Leslie 1 Director’s Note Simon Stone On any given night in the theatre, play about a human dilemma. His first it became a classic – by speaking to the play being performed should audience wasn’t watching a classic audiences about themselves and their feel to an audience like it’s never – they were seeing themselves, their world, their sorrows and joys, their been performed before. No matter mothers, their wives, their husbands, buried secrets and shames, their how many centuries, how many their fathers, up on the stage. They hopes and fears. So a Mississippi continents, how many theatres have saw their own problems being Delta plantation becomes any seen its production, tonight should confronted, their own demons being family property anywhere and we seem like the only night this story released, their own joys shattered and see how excoriatingly truthful this has ever been told or ever will be resurrected. In order to keep being examination of a family in crisis is. again. The play should appear to the play it was intended to be, Williams captures unerringly how have been expressly written for this Cat on a Hot Tin Roof needs to stop an impending death in a family can particular audience in this particular being a classic the night we watch reduce its members to selfishness time and place. Of course we all it. It can keep this mantle outside the and cruelty. He portrays with a know when we walk into a theatre theatre, in classrooms, in newspapers startling bluntness the festering that there have been performances and blogs, but in the theatre it’s a disease of a sexual problem at of this play before, sometimes story being told for the very first time the heart of a relationship and hundreds of thousands throughout about the life of the audience that’s the frustrations and agonies of history, but when the curtain rises watching it. Any convention that both parties in this situation. His or the lights turn on the production distances us from the immediacy of depiction of the intra-family politics must dissolve this awareness of Williams’ human message belongs to at a patriarch’s birthday party is the past in the immediacy of the the history of the play, not its present. both hilariously and terrifyingly new storytelling moment. The more recognisable. Each of his characters The play was written in accents native cultural baggage a play has, the more is drawn with a sympathy for their to the country it was performed in. the weight of preconception bears weaknesses, an understanding of In our country, those accents are down on it and the harder this is to what compels them and a love for Australian. It wasn’t written as a achieve. The longer the history and their particular place in the world. period piece, it was a contemporary the more present this history is in the And the poetry of their voices play set in the contemporary era and audience’s mind, the more layers of comes not from an incidental or in our time that is now. By stripping convention need to be removed from idiomatic musicality, it comes from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof back to its the play to see it as if for the first time. the characters’ deep insistence on timeless core, the play is allowed Underneath all these layers lies the declaring the truth of their human an opportunity to communicate to play that was born into the world and experience. Williams’ famous an audience the way it first did. We the intention with which it was born. lyricism is the music of truth, not of share the moment of discovery of a accent or location or period, and When Tennessee Williams wrote great play with decades of audiences that’s how he created classics. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he wasn’t before us. We forget that it’s a writing a classic, he was writing a classic in order to understand how 02 Simon Stone Williams started writing as a teenager and studied journalism and arts at various universities. All the while he wrote – poetry, essays, stories and plays – especially when he On Williams was hauled out of school by his Gabrielle Bonney father to work at a shoe factory. He would write at night. Said his mother I have found it easier to identify with His older sister Rose, with whom Edwina: ‘Tom would go to his room the characters who verge upon he developed a close bond, was with black coffee and cigarettes and hysteria, who were frightened of fragile and emotionally disturbed; I would hear the typewriter clicking life, who were desperate to reach eventually she was diagnosed with away at night in the silent house. out to another person. But these schizophrenia, institutionalised and Some mornings when I walked in to seemingly fragile people are the subjected to a lobotomy. Despite wake him for work, I would find him strong people really. TW having a younger brother, Williams sprawled fully dressed across the spent much of his childhood in the bed, too tired to remove his clothes.’ In 2011, in honour of the 100th company of women, notably Rose Tennessee Williams in 1965 When his first play, Battle of Angels, anniversary of the birth of one (who inspired many of his characters) was panned at its 1940 Boston of America’s most esteemed and his nursemaid. ‘He’s especially premiere, Tennessee Williams was Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams playwrights, the Harry Ransom brilliant at showing what women devastated, feeling that the audience shared a deep mutual friendship with Center at the University of Texas do when faced with intractably was unwilling to take on the play’s legendary director Elia Kazan. Kazan held an exhibition entitled Becoming unfair, unjust, and unendurable sexual and religious themes. Boston directed both the premiere of Miller’s Tennessee Williams. ‘There is circumstance,’ said fellow American City Council members called for Death of a Salesman on Broadway in no more influential twentieth- playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in the play to be censored and it ran 1949, and the premieres of Williams’ century American playwright than America). ‘The plotting, contriving, for less than two weeks. Then, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1956 and Tennessee Williams,’ said Charlotte scheming, fighting, and even the self- during the winter of 1944–45 his Sweet Bird of Youth in 1960. Kazan Canning, curator of the exhibition destruction. I think that they’re plays ‘memory play’ The Glass Menagerie went on to direct the now-classic films and professor at the university. ‘He about oppression and the struggle premiered in Chicago where it of Streetcar (starring Marlon Brando inspired future generations of writers against it.’ and Vivien Leigh) and Baby Doll, for as diverse as Suzan-Lori Parks, garnered good reviews. When it As a small child Williams was sick which Williams wrote the screenplays. Tony Kushner, David Mamet and transferred to New York it became for a year with either diphtheria or Kazan said of Williams: ‘Everything in John Waters, and his plays remain an instant and enormous hit during rheumatic fever and almost died. his life is in his plays, and everything among the most produced in the its long Broadway run – winning He was therefore a less robust child in his plays is in his life.’ In a letter to world.’ Williams was one of the three the New York Drama Critics’ Circle than his alcoholic, domineering father Kazan in 1959, Williams wrote: ‘Some major post-war American playwrights Award for best play of the season. would have liked. He reportedly day you will know how much I value – hot on the heels of Eugene O’Neill It was the beginning of a decade- suffered a tempestuous and torturous the great things you did with my work, and a contemporary of Arthur Miller – and-a-half in which Williams would relationship with Williams senior, how you lifted it above its measure by and became a playwriting force to be establish himself as one of America’s manifested in the Brick/Big Daddy your great gift.’ reckoned with by the time he was in truly great writers. He followed The relationship in Cat on a Hot Tin his early 30s. Glass Menagerie with A Streetcar Williams lived and worked under Roof. Cornelius Williams called his Named Desire (1947, Pulitzer Prize the constant threat of censorship Thomas Lanier ‘Tennessee’ Williams son ‘Miss Nancy’ and it wasn’t until for Drama, New York Drama Critics’ – which he both rallied against and III was born in Columbus, Mississippi, after his father’s death that Williams Circle Best Play), Cat on a Hot Tin succumbed to at times.

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