Cat On A Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams

Title: Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Author: Tennessee Williams      

Publish date: 1940 – first performance 1955

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Holy moly. Although I’m now sweating with irritation I’m glad I re-read that one. I don’t think a teenager in the 80s got a great deal out of it.

For those of you who have completely forgotten it (like me) and are left only with vague images of Elizabeth Taylor looking young and black-haired-white-frocked, the story is a squabble between members of a Mississippi cotton plantation owner’s family, essentially over money. He’s dying and no-one wants to tell him, everyone wants in on his will – which isn’t made. The play sticks to the Aristotelian unities but that’s pretty much it as far as application of any normal or accepted standards of writing are concerned. And the thing apparently won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I didn’t even know there was one.

I started gagging right at the start with Maggie’s histrionic evil fist-biting routines, which Williams insists on finding charming. The stage directions are insane. They go on for so long you really wonder why the hell he didn’t write a novel or just get onto a soap box instead. The dialogue is shit – everyone has the same diction, only more or less of it, and we’re reckoning here on southern drawl interspersed with out-of-place formal or literary vocabulary to carry us through. I guess in productions the actors have to make it their own, gloss over some things, accent others. On the page it’s infantile.

But you keep reading and start getting over the initial gut-reaction shock of the insane objectification and downgrading of women. It’s hard to do this because Williams buys into it so much himself, you hate everyone on stage, and the playwright.

Then you start to look. Hang on, it’s not only the women being forced to beg and being incapacitated. Brick is isolated for the mere thought he might have homosexual tendencies – in fact he rejects any possibility of it in himself and would burn it down fast as any of the other characters. Big Mamma is demeaned for being fat. Gooper’s rejected for being sober, Brick is rejected for being drunk. Mae is rejected for having children, Maggie is rejected for having none. Everyone (apart from Brick, who’s a spoiled brat and is currently only interested in the bottom of the bourbon bottle) wants money, because they think it’ll lead to something good. And the fount of this money, Big Daddy, is left entirely on his own while they break the news of his cancer to his wife. He’s rejected because he’s a good as dead.

I remembered an internet-circulated mini-video I saw just yesterday, with the title ‘Objectification of women hurts everyone’. In which they proceed to list the ‘type’ of woman it hurts – mothers, daughters, friends, grandmothers. Further casting pigeonholes and roles onto the very people they’re trying to support, and completely ignoring the fact that objectification of women also hurts men, and vice versa. Objectification of men – as breadwinners, as strong, as whatever typecast you put on them – deprives women of those roles as well as dooming men into their allotted pigeonholes. We still can’t grasp this. We still buy into all the advertising and the commercialism and the nothing-is-good-enough that Williams was so sick of he wrote this bananas play nearly eighty years ago. Sick of but still part of it, trying to tear it off as the characters are without knowing what or where it is. Like Big Daddy’s cancer, ‘it’s past the knife’. The rawness of render and uncontrolled frustration channel themselves directly past the characters, turning the whole play into a soapbox where the playwright does an unconscious show-not-tell on the state of society which, alarmingly, seems not to have changed from the 1940s.

I can’t give this moose-hoofs. Glad I re-read it but would prescribe it with a health warning attached. Take as necessary.