No one could accuse Tennessee Williams of being heavy-handed, worthy or obvious. Yet I felt for the first time that his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is not an entirely successful play. This all-black production, which had great success on Broadway last year and has now transferred to the Novello, left me feeling that the play, written in 1955, is not only too wordy but also rather dated. One of the main themes, the unrecognised and unacceptable homosexuality of the son of the house, no longer seems so powerful in a world where being gay is not hard to recognise or accept. The great gay secret at the centre of the play has lost the power that it had, for me at least, when I first saw it about 40 years ago.

That might not matter, perhaps. Themes don't necessarily become dated — a similar one in A Streetcar Named Desire has not done so at all. I suspect that it is a mark of second-rate writing. This new production transposes the play from the 1950s to the 1980s, and from a rich, all-white plantation family to a rich, all-black plantation family, with a few skilful changes, but none of that seems to change anything very much about the play, for better or for worse. It is not entirely plausible that a black field-hand (in the new version) could have become an immensely rich Southern plantation owner in the 1980s. Within seconds of the curtain rising, the colour of the cast became, to me as a white person, not only irrelevant but unnoticeable. 

I still wonder what the artistic purpose of the change could have been. If one were looking for a great play for an all-black cast, as was clearly the case here, I am not sure why one would choose Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

That aside, this production is well worth seeing, although, like the play, the cast was rather uneven. In the difficult first act, the highly-sexed young wife Maggie and her frustrating young husband Brick were not always emotionally convincing, despite their powerful presences. Their diction wasn't always good either. But in the second act everyone came together in a tangle of family mendacity that was extremely moving. James Earl Jones as the vicious, selfish, bullying, tender father is not to be missed; those who weep at the theatre will do so at his performance. The scene towards the end in which this dreadful Big Daddy walks out towards oblivion with his much-abused Big Mama (not quite as Williams wrote it) is nearly another of those great moments of theatre.