Tennessee Williams - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Sometimes the form makes all the difference; I don't think I would've liked Cat on a Hot Tin Roof half as much had it been a novel (or, more likely, a short story), well, even to the extent that that's a meaningful counterfactual at all, I mean. That said, in a lot of ways I'm drawn more to the play form than to the novel in any event - my inclination is always to pare things back, to live in the gaps and the spaces, and of their nature plays lend themselves more to such economy than their more descriptively fulsome cousins. Restraint can be more evocative than a torrent of words - and so it proves with Cat, for all of its melodramatic impulses. Williams' stage directions are unusually interiorised, most strikingly in the following long passage where the playwright actually breaks the fourth wall, at least on the page:

Brick's detachment is at last broken through. His heart is accelerated; his forehead sweat-beaded; his breath becomes more rapid and his voice hoarse. The thing they're discussing, timidly and painfully on the side of Big Daddy, fiercely, violently on Brick's side, is the inadmissible thing that Skipper died to disavow between them. The fact that if it existed it had to be be disavowed to "keep face" in the world they lived in, may be at the heart of the "mendacity" that Brick drinks to kill his disgust with. It may be the root of his collapse. Or maybe it is only a single manifestation of it, not even the most important. The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one man's psychological problem. I'm trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloud, flickering, evanescent - fiercely charged! - interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis. Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself. This does not absolve the playwright of his duty to observe and probe as clearly and deeply as he legitimately can: but it should steer him away from "pat" conclusions, facile definitions which make a play just a play, not a snare for the truth of human experience.

but they serve their purpose - they deepen one's appreciation of the play itself, characters, themes, structure(s), though only ever by casting light, realigning perspective, and never by cheating and introducing anything entirely extrinsic or new.

The above, too, serves as something of a statement of purpose for the play, and one which, I think, is fully achieved by the end - again, for all of the dramatics that take place, above all else Cat feels real. It doesn't have any gimmicks up its sleeve, nor any particular conceits (at least beyond those which are common to all plays, which map on to those common to all literature as written), but instead strives for, and reaches, a kind of truthfulness which cuts to the heart of the relationships and mores which are its subject (I felt that indefinable 'truthfulness', or perhaps 'honesty', more clearly in Williams' original version than in the alternate version, with its revised final act, prepared under original director Elia Kazan's influence and evincing more of a developmental arc, and liked it correspondingly more). Maggie and Brick are drawn in a broad, confident hand, and while their interactions with each other, and those between all of the other characters, are unquestionably 'stagey', they breathe with an air of reality, and one genuinely engages with them as people, and not merely as 'characters'. It's swamped in atmosphere, too - a sense of time and place. Without wanting to be too backwards lookin', they don't seem to write 'em like this any more.