Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Gate Theatre, Dublin Previews until Apr 4 20 Opens Apr 5-Jun 11 7.30pm 25-35 (students 15 Mon-Thurs) 01-8744045 gatetheatre.ie

“I’m not living with you,” Maggie the Cat tells her husband, Brick. “We’re just sharing the same cage.” Tennessee Williams’s sweltering psychodrama of 1955, set on the Memphis cotton plantation of Brick’s father, Big Daddy Pollitt, is a study in emotional, financial and sexual confinement.

Maggie has clawed her way out of penury into a suffocating relationship with a failed sports star whose interests now extend only as far as his dead friend, Skipper, and the bottom of a bourbon bottle. Brick’s tangled sexuality and muted soul-searching stand in the way of finagling a proper inheritance, and so mendacity and morality enter the cage.

The Gate continues its fascination with sharply realised classic American drama by inviting celebrated US director Mark Brokaw back to its stage, following his capable revivals of Miller and Mamet for the theatre in previous years. Here staging Williams’s own favourite work, Brokaw is assisted by Fiona O’Shaughnessy as Maggie, Richard Flood as Brick and the excellent Owen Roe as the bestial but tender Big Daddy. The Gate’s always a stickler for production values, so the real challenge may be for their dialect coach.

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