Classic ‘Cat’ in Repertory revival

Press, 2 August 1977, Page 21

Classic ‘Cat’ in Repertory revival

"Cat On a Hot Tin Roof,” the Tennessee Williams play which won the Pulitzer Prize and the New .York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1955, will be presented by the Canterbury Repertory Theatre Society for a seven-night season at the Repertory Theatre, opening on Saturday. The production is directed by Elody Rathgen, and the set design is by Peter LeesJeffries. The play is an intense dissection of some of the most powerful human ' emotions — greed, dread .of death. love, hate, despair. It is set in Mississippi, the state where Williams grew up, in the heat-drenched home of the Delta’s biggest cottonplanter. Mervyn Glue plays Big Daddy, the plantation t colossus whose blunt questioning of his son brings forth the real reason why this young man can no longer stand the sight of his pretty wife, and why he had renounced all other interests in life in favour of trips to Echo Spring, his wry name for his liquor cabinet. Toni Peters, who was Emily in "The Brontes” and Anna in “And Miss Riordan Drinks A Little,” plays Maggie, his wife, who describes herself as feeling as taut and insecure as a “cat on a hot tin roof.” Grant Edgar appears as Brick, her disintegrating husband who coldly advises her to jump off the roof into the arms of another man — to which she replies that the only victory of such a cat is to stay on the roof as long as she can.

The plot of the play revolves partly around her struggle to reclaim her husband from the morbid depths into which she has cast him by improving the purity of his friendship with his old college foot-

ball team-mate, for whose death he blames her. The plot is also concerned with the tragedy of Big Daddy himself, doomed to die of cancer while his family gathers to celebrate his 65th birthday — and also with the conniving of his elder son to obtain all the dying man’s estate for himself. Ingrid Prossor plays Big Mama, the garrulous wife whom the dying plantation owner treats with contempt. Mark Lewington is Gooper, their selfrighteous, scheming elder son, and Kim Foster appears as Mae, his venomous wife. Also in the cast are David Cooper, Stuart Thomson, Deirdre Henderson, and Maureen Lynch, with Anna Prossor, Jonathan Foster, and Peter Ellis as Mae’s children. Nineteen years after its first New York production, in 1974 “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” was chosen for the summer season at the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford, Connecticutt — the first play by a living American playwright to be performed at this theatre. The production was later transferred to New York by the American National Theatre and Academy. The play was also chosen for Laurence Olivier’s first television production (with Derek Granger as coproducer), when a twohour adaptation was shown throughout the United States last December by Granada in association with N.B.C. Olivier played Big Daddy. “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” markes the return of Peter Lees-Jeffries to Reperatory design after 10 years. In 1968 he was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council grant to study design overseas. He stayed five years and, since his return. has designed 14 productions for the Court Theatre, including three at the James Hay Theatre.