Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Reviews – starring Daisy Edgar Jones & Kingsley Ben-Adir at the Almeida Theatre in London

"‘Normal People’ star Daisy Edgar-Jones is a total revelation in Rebecca Frecknall’s gothic horrorshow spin on the Tennessee Williams classic"

"... Daisy Edgar-Jones is truly phenomenal as Maggie, the complicated female lead of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

"... she is so, so good, inhabiting Maggie with a burning, vivacious swagger, alternatively self-mocking, self-pitying, compassionate and vicious in her diatribe to Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Brick about the wretched state of their marriage. Sometimes she feels like a stand-up comedian, at others a fey spirit."

"In a performance the tonal opposite of Edgar-Smith’s, Ben-Adir spends much of the play horizontal and virtually catatonic. Brick was always taciturn, but Ben-Adir takes it to a new level; terrific acting, but sacrificing showing off to the greater good of the play."

"If Frecknall directs Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as a sort of Southern Gothic, then the horror here is the hell of other people. Everyone is trapped with everyone else."

"Not everyone is going to love Frecknall’s doomy reimagining of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which Big Daddy’s mansion is a house of trapped spirits. But amidst the gloom, there’s a glimmer – what makes Frecknall’s Tennessee Williams productions so powerful is that she always manages to find the goodness in his cracked characters, always makes us care about them."

"Daisy Edgar-Jones is a force of nature in this striking revival"

"Director Rebecca Frecknall’s vivid interpretation makes a hazily-remembered classic feel new and strange"

"... Daisy Edgar-Jones proves a force of nature in her first major stage role, playing the trapped and headstrong Maggie in Tennessee Williams’s Mississippi family psychodrama. She gives an intense and physically exact performance as a woman born poor and aware of the currency of her body and its fecundity. There’s intention in every tilt of her shoulders or arch or her bare instep."

"Those shows were cast colourblind: here it matters that the dying Big Daddy, the overseer who took over and transformed a cotton plantation owned by two white “sissies”, is Black, while his reviled but adoring wife (Clare Burt, excellent) is white. It adds depth to his ferocity and weight to the issues of inheritance and legacy. Race becomes a factor alongside sexuality, mortality, dominance and duplicity."

"There’s less wit and urgency here than in some of her work (it dawdles past the three-hour mark). But it is a striking and vivid interpretation that makes a hazily-remembered classic feel new and strange."

"Above all, Frecknall is a tremendous director of actors. The sight of Edgar-Jones, imperious atop the piano, made me briefly wonder what she’d be like as St Joan. Brick is a thankless role – even Paul Newman did little with it in the 1958 film – but Ben-Adir makes him profoundly wretched and possibly incontinent."

"And then there’s Lennie James as Big Daddy... he’s magnetic. It’s thrilling to see Edgar-Jones take the stage, but it’s truly great to have an actor of his calibre back there, too."

"Daisy Edgar-Jones is glorious in the unflinching Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"

"Undercurrents of emotion pulsate through every scene of Tennessee Williams's play of thwarted passion and fracturing families"

"Director Rebecca Frecknall and a play by Tennessee Williams has been an unbeatable combination so far for the Almeida"

"Edgar-Jones, a Hollywood star these days, returns in glory to the venue at which she made her professional stage debut. Frecknall is unsurpassed at stripping away accumulated frippery from Williams’s work and honing in unrelentingly on the undercurrents of emotion that pulsate through every scene."

"Edgar-Jones speaks for the majority of the first hour in a turn of bravura endurance, as she prowls sinuously around her surly, taciturn husband, purring seductively like the namesake feline but with claws drawn, ever ready to pounce with killer ferocity when she spots her opportunity."

"Ben-Adir is a study in the hopelessness of drunken depression and Clare Burt excels as a woman so used to putting a brave face on things that she has quite forgotten where the truth lies."

"... the raw power is unflinching in its minatory magnificence."

"A bruising, claustrophobic drama"

"Daisy Edgar-Jones stars in Tennessee Williams’s searingly unhappy play at London’s Almeida Theatre"

"Brick’s wife Maggie, the titular feline and played here with panther-like stealth and ferocity by Daisy Edgar-Jones"

"That mendacity comes over loud and clear in Rebecca Frecknall’s bruising, claustrophobic production, in which bad faith seems to hang in the air like mist, pooling in the corners of Chloe Lamford’s coldly opulent set. The latest of Frecknall’s Williams stagings (her superlative Streetcar is about to open in the West End), it hums with tension and seethes with despair, drawing a link between Williams’s miserable rich family and the feuding dynasty in Succession."

"Lennie James is wonderfully complex as the tough patriarch... Ben-Adir meanwhile gives a stonking performance as Brick, bringing brilliantly precise physicality to his character’s increasing intoxication"

"In the end, Frecknall’s staging steers through all the noise to something far more sad than angry: an image of a woman high on hope, bent over her near-comatose husband — two unbearably lonely people trapped in a dishonest society."

"Daisy Edgar-Jones in a psychological horror with a suffocating grip"

"But by the end, the production burns itself out and leaves the audience exhausted"

"... what a savage, poisonous, ugly work this semi-autobiographical piece proves anew in Frecknall’s unflinching, if overlong revival, which relocates it from its 1950s plantation setting to the anonymous sterile environs of today’s super rich: a psychological horror story wrapped in half truths, delusions, vengeance and the festering unhappiness of abused wives and defeated men."

"Both vamp and ingenue in red lipstick and flimsy blue slip, Edgar-Jones sets the oppressive, semi-unhinged tone from the start as the wife of Brick"

"At the centre here is Lennie James’ quietly magnificent tyrannical Big Daddy"

"In perhaps the best scene here, it’s Big Daddy who forces Brick to fully acknowledge this truth and somehow Ben-Adir, in a deeply compassionate performance, makes sense of Brick’s anachronistic abject self-loathing within a modern setting."

"Yet Frecknall’s production burns itself out by the end of the second act, leaving it with no where to go for its final 30 minutes."

"Daisy Edgar-Jones is full of angry energy in a stylish family face-off"

"Rebecca Frecknall’s stark production brings out the rage in Williams’ play through powerful performances, but fails to plumb all its emotional depths"

"She [Daisy Edgar-Jones] is a convincingly catlike Maggie, but she is not a pleading seductress. She works hard to poke Brick for a reaction, becoming increasingly enraged by his aggressive silences, speaking of her sex appeal rather than using it as her currency"

"Frecknall’s production is full of stylishness as a whole but it does not plumb the emotional depths at the core of the play. It does switch gears in the second act, though, with the family’s face-offs over the terminal diagnosis of its alpha-patriarch, Big Daddy (who is the last to know he is dying), and the ensuing tussle for his inheritance."

"Ben-Adir plays a convincing and vulnerable drunk, yet still looks like the athlete and football player he once was."

"... although Williams stated that the play should have two intermissions, the second pause here, which leads into the final act, drains the drama that has built up previously, so it seems to end on a minor note. Ultimately, this is a production that you admire rather than one that moves you."

"Daisy Edgar-Jones and Kingsley Ben-Adir in an intelligent yet passive production"

"Big Daddy is dying, but in Lennie James’s coruscating performance, he is both clutching desperately at life and attempting, finally, to get at the truth of Brick’s self-loathing."

"Frecknall makes the action both universal and abstract by setting it on Chloe Lamford’s shimmering embossed set, an anonymous room with darkness and clouds beyond its back wall, an arena where the battling forces gather to fight, drink and suffer."

"It’s all beautifully charted and characteristically thoughtful."

"Yet the realism of Ben-Adir’s descent into stupor, eyes slowly glazing, hands shaped around his next drink, desperate for the click in his head that will bring him peace, until he ends the play lying on the stage, his face a mask of blankness, creates its own kind of momentum. The production seems almost to wind down, running out of energy before the close."

"For all its detail and care, the production never again matches the electricity they generate. It’s illuminating, but strangely passive."

"Baroque, red-in-tooth-and-claw intensity"

"Rebecca Frecknall turns the volume all the way up on Tennessee Williams’ tale of a family’s implosion"

"... Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Maggie the Cat in this loud, savage staging."

"As Maggie pleads with and berates Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Brick over their expired sex life and lack of children with a hard brightness, you can see a woman fiercely aware that her crumbling marriage could throw her back into the poverty of her childhood. What you can’t really feel, though, is the hum of desperate sexual frustration."

"Ben-Adir, meanwhile, becomes the dominant presence on stage, mainly because he gives such an impressive, sustained performance of drunkenness that it’s hard to take your eyes off him."

"His face-off with Lennie James’ Big Daddy makes for compelling theatre. James gives us a gloriously awful Deep South patriarch"

"Oddly, the question of Brick’s sexuality at times seems almost incidental – here, Brick appears genuinely affronted that anyone should have misinterpreted his relationship with Skipper, which you can’t help feeling strips a layer of complexity from his character. The suggestion in the programme notes that this production is somehow exploring the dynamics of a mixed-race family also seems like a reach. But if baroque, red-in-tooth-and-claw intensity is what you seek from a Williams play, you won’t feel short-changed."

"Daisy Edgar-Jones struggles in a long evening"

"Director Rebecca Frecknall stumbles badly in her often ponderous adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s classic at the Almeida, N1"

"With Daisy Edgar-Jones, of Normal People and Twisters fame, playing the volcanic, sexually unfulfilled Maggie, the box office can expect to do good business, but this weirdly off-kilter production, alternately ponderous and manically overheated, could almost be a parody of Williams’s gothic manner."

"As the play unfolds, the suspicion grows stronger that we may be expected to see the musician (Seb Carrington takes on the thankless role) as the ghost of Skipper, the deceased buddy of Maggie’s alcoholic husband, Brick. Frecknall adds to the confusion by placing the drama in a strangely anonymous space."

"How does Edgar-Jones cope with the challenge of bringing the garrulous Maggie to life? She starts off brightly enough, but never has a chance to bring much light and shade to a character"

"Things perk up with the arrival of Lennie James’s Big Daddy, the gruff self-made man who is unaware that his long-term stomach illness is terminal. James presents us with a defiant portrait of a patriarch who seems to be shrinking in front of our eyes."

"For all his virtues, James can’t stop a long evening slipping into mannered excess."

"Daisy Edgar-Jones fails to grasp the darkness and depth in Tennessee Williams revival"

"... Edgar-Jones’s Hollywood poise and an unbalanced plot means she fails to make an emotional impact"

"... Daisy Edgar-Jones is too poised to draw us into caring about this unlikeable woman, twisting her beautifully dressed body into contortions her face can’t manage. But as it builds, Rebecca Frecknall’s star-filled staging finds a queer kind of power.""

"The queerness of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has often been sublimated or toned down, especially when it premiered in the hypocritical 1950s, but it’s central here."

"... it’s only when Brick is left alone with Lennie James’s towering Big Daddy that the production finally reaches its full force. James is awful and awe-inspiring at once as an ailing family patriarch who’s high on the drug of truth, yelling “crap!” at the relatives who think they can patronise and flatter their way into an inheritance."

"Frecknall’s play runs long and slow at 180 minutes – and it feels unbalanced, too, with Maggie’s thin scenes outweighed by her husband’s bloated ones. If her previous stagings of Williams’s plays have centred on sisterhood, this is all about a booze-soaked brotherhood, one that’s mistakenly angry at women for wrongs they’ve done to themselves."