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‘Cat’ comes to Karachi
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams’s third remarkable play following The Glass Menagerie in 1944 and A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, was a huge commercial success, running for 694 performances on Broadway.
Cat won Williams his third New York Drama Critics Award and his second Pulitzer Prize (his first being for Streetcar). Elia Kazan produced and directed the play in 1955 at the Morosco Theatre after asking Williams to revise the third act to improve its dramatic progression to a conventional happy ending.
The play contains all the necessary elements of a good drama, consisting of a plot, characters, theme, diction, music and spectacle. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof also has all of the earmarks of Williams’s one-of-their-kind dramas, involving his emotionally biographical themes of ambiguity in sexual orientation, disaffection and obscurity in maintaining intimate relationships. The themes running through Cat are so real that each story within the grand story makes sense and can be easily related to. The desperation that exists in each relationship –– be it between the husbands and wives, or a father and son –– all enable us to experience the greed, lust and envy that each character reveals through the course of three fabulously laid out acts.
The screen version of Cat was released by MGM studio and it starred screen legends Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman playing the lead roles. The film version was a huge commercial success and Tennessee Williams was paid $500,000, a handsome sum in 1958.
Recently, the Jinnah University College’s theatre group –– The Thespian Society –– presented the legendary play at the Pakistan American Cultural Centre (PACC). With the oldest actor being 21 years of age, the show troupe put forth a remarkable performance, pleasantly surprising the audience. They, along with the director of the play, Mariam Farhan Khan, an academic director at the university, put in great efforts to recreate a modern classic which is timeless in its themes.
The plot centres on the members of a Southern family who gather together to celebrate the biggest cotton planter this side of the valley of Nile, Big Daddy Pollit’s (Ali Sohail) 65th birthday. They have found out that he is dying of cancer and after quarrelling, have finally dealt with many of the lies and hypocrisy in their lives. Conflict is no doubt paramount to a good play, and this plot is brimming with controversy.
The play concerns a young man, Brick (Hammad Umer) and his disaffection and descent into alcoholism following the death of his college friend, Skipper and his wife. It also deals with Maggie’s (Sumaiya Matin Khan) efforts to make him stop drinking so that he can take over his dying father, Big Daddy’s plantation.
The dialogue delivery was crisp and did justice to Williams’s characters. Sumaiya, playing Maggie, truly captured the essence of the play’s text, colouring it with a sizzling interpretation of Maggie the Cat, hisses, screams and all. She was so strong in her character that one can barely remember who played Brick or Big Daddy in the stage play
The dialogue delivery was crisp and did justice to Williams’s characters: Brick, the bitter, alcoholic ex-athlete; Brick’s frustrated wife Margaret, the Cat; Big Daddy, the patriarch, who is dying of cancer; Big Mama (Yelena Sacha Anthony), the squeaky mother-of-all; Big Daddy’s older son and Brother Man, Gooper Pollit (Khurram Afzal) and Gooper’s wife, Mae (Hiba Tameem).
The play begins with Mag-gie giving a sarcastic and scornful presentation of the historical family background and sets the scene for the development and climax of the up-coming crisis. The second act is all about Big Daddy, for he, according to Williams, is the embodiment of the American dream –– he is a commercial success, but a failure in every other aspect. He has failed as a human being in that he centred his little empire on himself and became blind to the needs and feelings of those around him, including his wife and children.An invisible struggle takes place within Big Daddy as he tries to approach Brick, as a loving father approaches his needy child. The two men talk and talk while saying nothing of essence and not listening to each other most of the time. Although criticised as being overly violent and over-sentimental, the powerful second act, in which the father confronts his alcoholic son about the controversial nature of his relationship with his friend, Skipper, is considered “a hallmark of contemporary drama”.
In the last act, the whole family finds out that Big Daddy is dying of cancer. Big Momma breaks down and it is revealed that even though Brother Man and Mae had five children, the old couple would prefer to give away the “Twenty eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the Valley Nile” to Brick and Maggie, only if they had a child.
The sisters-in-law quarrel over their husband’s right to inherit Big Daddy’s fortune, and in the end, to the shock of everyone, Maggie reveals that she is pregnant with Brick’s child. The play’s ending puzzles the audience, where Brick takes Maggie’s side and gives in to his love for her. Williams, however, is said to have preferred his original ending since this ending reflected Brick’s ambivalence and weakness.
The tone of the young actors captured and reflected the tension between the characters of the play to perfection. Sumaiya, playing Maggie, truly captured the essence of the play’s text, colouring it with a sizzling interpretation of Maggie the Cat, hisses, screams and all. She was so strong in her character that one can barely remember who played Brick or Big Daddy in the stage play. Hammad, Yelena, Hiba and both the Ali’s also gave remarkable performances, each very close to the jest of the real character. The director has done a commendable job as well, highlighting the themes running through the original play.However, a few of those fantastic conversations in the book that keep the reader gripped were edited in the on-stage adaptation for the sake of brevity for which the director apologised beforehand. A plus however, was that the characters were allowed their theatrical monologues and the references to Brick and Skipper’s relationship were left intact. All in all, Cat was an explosive family drama about greed, secrets, guilt, alcoholism and sexual frustration, which was presented with dedication and hard work; a rare commodity in under-21-year-olds. Bravo!
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