Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Tennessee Williams's southern discomfort

Given that it is Tennessee Williams's best play, it is surprising how rarely we see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Since its British premiere in 1958, it has had only three major London revivals. Although many people know it through the disastrously diluted Elizabeth Taylor-Paul Newman movie, it is not that often seen on regional stages, either: I can trace four Scottish revivals in the last 15 years, but few in England. So Sarah Esdaile's new production at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, which opens later this week, should give us a chance to re-assess a play that, in the near 60 years since Williams started writing it, has been the source of endless controversy, confusion and debate.

First, it's worth reminding ourselves what it's actually about. At its most basic, it confronts the issue that runs through all great American drama, from Eugene O'Neill onwards: the conflict between truth and illusion. Set on a rich Mississippi plantation, Williams's play shows the conflict from many angles. Brick, an alcoholic ex-athlete, refuses to sleep with his vivacious wife, Maggie, supposedly out of guilt over the suicide of his old friend, Skipper: what Brick is unable to confront is his own, and Skipper's, latent homosexuality. Brick's father, a towering patriarch known as Big Daddy over whose inheritance the family squabbles, is equally unable to face up to the fact he is dying of cancer. The two illusions meet head-on in the great father-son confrontation in the second act. But, although the play offers a social critique and rich southern humour, it finally asks whether it is better to live by lies or truth.

This may be vintage Williams but right from the start this particular Cat has been dogged, so to speak, by argument. The original 1955 Broadway production ran for nearly 700 performances, won Williams his second Pulitzer prize and restored a reputation badly dented by the failure of Camino Real. But, even though it was a big commercial success, Cat raised a fundamental issue. Whose text was it – the author's or the director's? The nub of the matter is that the director, Elia Kazan (all-conquering after his 1954 movie, On the Waterfront), persuaded Williams to exchange his original third act for one the director approved of. Specifically, Kazan asked for a last act in which Maggie was shown more sympathetically, the dying Big Daddy reappeared, and Brick underwent some form of moral awakening. Williams eventually published both versions, inviting readers to make their choice. It's a measure of Kazan's awesome power and Williams's desperation for a Broadway hit ("He wanted it passionately," said Kazan) that the author gave way to the director.

Does it matter? I think it does. Williams's original version is leaner and sparer. Kenneth Tynan, writing about the text played on Broadway, picked up on a small, symbolic difference between the two. Williams's original has Maggie, uttering her big lie to win Big Daddy's inheritance, say: "Brick and I are going to have a child." In the Kazan-approved version, this portentously becomes "A child is coming, sired by Brick out of Maggie the Cat." Director Sarah Esdaile, after researching all Williams's variations, has gone back to a 1974 script that combines the best of both the original and the Broadway texts. I'll be fascinated to see how this revised version plays in Leeds.

Textual variations are one issue. A far bigger one, in the 1950s, was Williams's handling of homosexuality. Some people thought the play went too far, others that it didn't go nearly far enough. The critic Eric Bentley, writing in the New Republic, thought Williams ducked the issue by not exploring further Brick's real nature. Having been told in advance that this was the play in which homosexuality would finally be presented without evasion, Bentley wanly concluded: "The miracle still has not happened."

But in Britain the whole subject was too much for the Lord Chamberlain, who then had the right to forbid plays a licence for public performance. It is blush-making to think that in 1958, when Peter Hall staged the British premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, audiences had to go through the ludicrous fiction of paying to join a private members' club, the New Watergate, in order to see the play staged at the Comedy theatre. It is equally shaming to think that Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, in which one man kisses another on stage, had to be presented under the same hypocritical banner. Only in Britain would it be assumed that payment of a small fee somehow insulated one from moral corruption; but such was the idiotic law until censorship's demise in 1968.

America, however, had its own censorship problems. In the cinema, the outdated Hays' Code was used to limit freedom of expression. The irony is that one of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof's great virtues is that it shows Big Daddy's tolerant understanding of Brick's sexuality. Richard Brooks's ridiculous 1958 Hollywood film was obliged to water down Williams's message for public consumption. It may have had Elizabeth Taylor smouldering in a satin slip, but it offered no more than dark hints as to the reasons for Paul Newman's refusal to sleep with her and, as I recall, even denied that Maggie's attempted seduction of Skipper got as far as the bedroom. This was a badly neutered Cat that inspired Williams on one occasion to tell a queue waiting in line for tickets: "This movie will set the industry back 50 years. Go home!"

The author wasn't much more thrilled with a 1976 Granada TV production, starring Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner. Here, according to Williams, Laurence Olivier mistakenly conceived Big Daddy as "a southern planter gentleman instead of a former overseer who struck it rich through hard work". In fact, you have to leap forward to 1988 to find a British production that finally did full justice to Williams's symphonic play. This was Howard Davies's superlative revival at the National theatre, starring Lindsay Duncan as Maggie, Ian Charleson as Brick and Eric Porter as Big Daddy. Everything one hoped for was there: the social satire in the shape of Brick's elder brother, Gooper, moving in for the kill as his father's cancer is confirmed; the comedy in the form of the "no-neck monsters", who constitute Gooper and Mae's family, putting on a tackily choreographed display for Big Daddy; and the defiance of Duncan's Maggie, announcing her pregnancy with tilted chin as if challenging anyone to dispute it.

Since that breakthrough production, London has seen two other major revivals. In 2001, Anthony Page staged the play with three American actors in the lead roles: Brendan Fraser as Brick, Frances O'Connor as Maggie and Ned Beatty as Big Daddy. I said at the time it caught well "the passion and power of the state of Tennessee", but it has left few indelible memories. Far more impressive was the 2009 import of Debbie Allen's Broadway production, with a distinguished all-black cast. Ethnicity mattered here less than the production's emotional firepower: Sanaa Lathan's Maggie was so sizzlingly sensual she almost burned a hole in the satin bedsheets. The confrontation between Adrian Lester's Brick and James Earl Jones's Big Daddy was equally overwhelming: I've never forgotten the latter's shift from crude vulgarian, doing obscene pelvic thrusts as a sign of his sexual power, to anxious therapist as he sought to analyse and articulate his son's problem.

It is probably easier now than it was in the 1950s to get a handle on Williams's play. A work considered salacious and sensationalist by some, and overly cautious by others, can now be seen in its true colours. What Williams does is expose the twin illusions, especially prevalent in the America in which he wrote, that sexuality is some kind of rigidly predetermined absolute, and that possessions can protect you against death. Above all, the play is an attack on a world in which we lie to ourselves and others; and it's a sign of Williams's subversive and still under-rated humour that, in finally supporting Maggie's lie, Brick adds to the mendacity he has hitherto assailed. It's an astonishing, multi-faceted play that, in Britain, has taken us decades to appreciate.

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