Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.(Review)

Publication: Spectator

Publication Date: 29-SEP-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Lyric)

Lazy charm

The autumn season for the West End opens in a difficult international time, but is off to a dramatic start with Anthony Page's rare revival of Tennessee Williams's steaming, deep-southern, Kentucky-fried Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Lyric. Originally written as a sequence of short stories in 1954, and endlessly rewritten for stage and screen thereafter, this is the one about Maggie the Cat and the no-neck monsters and Big Daddy, and is often in danger nowadays of looking like the pilot for Dallas or Dynasty.

Indeed, when it was last staged, by the National in 1988 in a laughably English convention with the late Eric Porter as the unlikeliest of Big Daddies, I thought we might have to give up the play for good as locally unrevivable. But Anthony Page -- like Michael Blakemore one of...

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