Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Her Majesty's Theatre, Grote Street, Adelaide; March 11-16; www.adelaidefestival.com.au
Two years ago Adelaide Festival audiences were bowled over by German company Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz Berlin, its director Thomas Ostermeier and their rather original take on Ibsen's A Doll's House - reconstituted by them as Nora with major fish tank and much angst.
They return this year on a wave of anticipation with another major de/reconstruction: Tennessee Williams' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. This time the visit is a curate's egg: good in parts and a bit smelly around the edges.
Ostermeier seems to have a thing about symbolically entrapped animals. The goldfish of Nora were rather attractive in a sort of dentist's waiting room way and were not particularly distracting or disturbing. In this new production a large raptor spends the two hours of the play perched on a disembodied tree trunk in a poo-spattered glass enclosure high above the action.
The bird preens occasionally, peers at the audience occasionally, seems not to be very worried by bursts of rock music and heavily symbolic video footage, moves up and down the tree trunk without apparent prompting and, once or twice, lifts its magnificent tail and squirts - to the tittering amusement of audience members who were as distracted and puzzled by the bird as I was.
There is no hint in the surtitles (the play is in German) of a connection between it and Brick, Maggie, Big Daddy, Big Mama, Gooper and Mae, despite grainy video footage of circling vultures. There is also grainy footage of Formula 1 racing cars which might have more to do with Adelaide and/or Brick's uncertain masculinity than the play itself, but it's hard to figure out and probably not worth bothering about anyway.
Tennessee Williams' hot Southern family drama has been transplanted to an odd ultra-Euro living area with much grubby glass and absolutely no sense of connection to the 28,000 acres of cotton plantation which is at the heart of the family feud. The actors enact their roles - sexually enigmatic Brick, sexually explicit Maggie, boofy Big Daddy, hysterical Big Mama, grabby shrewish Mae and grabby goofy Gooper - with cartoonish gusto. They are entertaining without ever reaching deeper than the surface of their roles.
Why Nora> worked and Cat doesn't is a matter of conjecture. My theory is that Ibsen's play is a chilly, northern European artefact that suits the ethos and heavily symbolic style of the company; Tennessee Williams and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, on the other hand, are of the hot Deep South of the United States and to deconstruct this without first figuring out a plausible reconstruction is a recipe for bewilderment and pointlessness.
It's not that the actors did a bad job, it's more that it was irrelevant and without raison d'etre. And that's death in theatre.
