Secrets and lies of family strife

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Royal Exchange, Manchester to Nov 29

IF you want an almost Jacobean lunge into family dirty laundry, few playwrights have managed to achieve such a level of emotional intensity as Tennessee Williams.

Williams’s works are now period pieces in Fifties Deep South settings, with secrets and lies that today wouldn’t cause even mild eyelid-batting — and which doesn’t make a director’s or actor’s job any easier.

Last time James Dacre directed at the Exchange the result was the excellent “Accrington Pals”, which couldn’t have been more direct and honest.

But in this play, no-one is honest, except perhaps Big Daddy himself, whose blunt rudeness can be cruel in a way only a man with millions of dollars, thousands of acres of prime land and a short lifespan can be.

As Daddy, Daragh O’Malley cuts a decidedly no-nonsense figure, berating his wife, revealing his feelings about her to family members and putting down pretty well everyone around him.

Though he is cruel on the surface he cares about his son Brick’s sadness at the death of his friend Skipper and his subsequent alcoholism — in fact it’s pretty much the only thing he does care about, as he reveals in the long second-act scene between the two of them.

Sadly the other half of the duo is rather miscast: Charles Aitken seems a little young and not sufficiently invested in his character to be a match for the father. During the evening Brick drinks two bottles of whisky without so much as slurred speech.

Also rather annoying in her overbaked character is Kim Criswell as Big Mama — more Fifties pop throwback than deeply-hurt matriarch. But her other son Gooper (Matthew Douglas) and his wife Mae (Victoria Elliott) are suitably avaricious — and their kids delightfully twee and annoying.

As Maggie, the jittery cat of the title, Mariah Gale is sexy and worried about her status and her man, but the role seems less important than usual in among the revelations of her husband’s possible homosexuality — elements of the story played down in the famous movie of the play.

Another oddity is the set — a sort of walk-through, all gloss-white affair with a dresser, a chaise and a bed, and in which all the action seems to take place.