Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Belvoir presents

By Director This production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened at on Wednesday 20 February 2013. It transferred to Theatre Royal, , 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 Margaret JACQUELINE McKENZIE Mae ‘Sister Woman’ 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