'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' review — Daisy Edgar-Jones is unbearably poignant in this scorching Tennessee Williams revival

Read our review of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, now in performances at the Almeida Theatre to 1 February 2025.

Oof, this tin roof is hot. And not because of the Mississippi Delta sun blazing above it, but because of the absolute pressure cooker brewing up within a house of open secrets – where ‘mendacity’ is the governing principle, but each occupant is only successfully lying to themselves.

Having had phenomenal success with her productions of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (with Paul Mescal, returning in 2025) and the less-often-staged Summer and Smoke – both of which secured sold-out West End runs following a critically acclaimed opening stint at the Almeida – director Rebecca Frecknall turns her attention to the playwright’s scorchingly profound story of crippling inner loneliness and shackled sexual longing.

The production marks a full circle moment for Daisy Edgar-Jones, who performed in the Almeida’s production of Albion just before Normal People put her firmly on the map. Here, she gives a career-elevating performance as disenchanted housewife Maggie, the embittered, fading Southern belle whose womb is left barren by the husband who refuses to sleep with her, and who is unfairly blamed for his disinterest and drinking.

In Edgar-Jones, she’s a woman whose nerves are shot, and whose anxious pain at her predicament catches in her throat and plays on her trembling lip. Like the cat of her allegory, clinging defiantly to an uncomfortably hot surface, she’s unable to give up hope, and so is stuck in a pitiful cycle of scorn, pleading, blackmailing and, in Frecknall’s often abstract take, prowling on all fours in the vain hope of seducing the disinterested Brick (Kingsley Ben-Adir).

While the first act is pretty much Maggie goading a vacant Brick, Ben-Adir matches her performance in Act Two with a chilling display of unabashed self-loathing. Skipper, his best friend, fellow sportsman and probable lover, has died, leaving him unable to express or even process his emotions. It’s a physically demanding performance: he skulks, slurs and stumbles, often with a crutch in one hand and a glass of whisky in the other. Maggie’s desperation repelling Brick’s indifference is almost unbearable to watch.

Performances are strong all round. Lennie James is a morbid but chummy Big Daddy, riddled with questions about his own marriage now his health is failing. Pearl Chanda’s Mae is suitably smug as the wife who has it all and is set on inheriting the family’s 28,000-acre plot of land. There are also some clever visual juxtapositions between upright son Gooper (a suited, eager-to-please Ukweli Roach) and Brick, who remains the golden boy despite spending the third act incapacitated on the floor.

A minimalist, dimly lit and intermittently smoky aesthetic syncs it up with Frecknall’s other Williams adaptations, and here, this treatment is applied to Chloe Lamford’s metallic stage – the harsh walls and ceilings of which fit a play about people who don’t so much live together as “occupy the same cage”. A grand piano manned by Seb Carrington acts as the story’s truthsayer: chords flinching when inner emotions boil over or lies threaten to be outed. And Carrington also haunts the stage as a spectral Skipper, still vividly present in Brick’s mind.

“Life has got to continue even after the dream of life is over,” said Williams, who himself was no stranger to Brick’s predicament. Here’s a production which uncomfortably captures that anguish.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is at the Almeida Theatre to 1 February 2025.

Photo credit: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Photos by Marc Brenner)