Theatre Letter

In Cat on a Tin Roof, “living a lie” means accepting various dull things for form’s sake, but mainly a marriage with someone who repels you. There are three levels of awareness in marriage described, but on stage the lowest, comic-strip couple is the only one to demonstrate lies effective in action: they poke each other in the ribs and snap each others’ heads off while successfully impressing the family with their domestic bliss and prowess. Yet they are basically less horrible than the other couples, who are accorded more sympathy as being conscious of their failings. Big Daddy, the father of the two grown sons, brutal throughout to his adoring wife, can hardly be taken as a lovable old comic, unless you respond perversely and sentimentally to vile old men. His son Brick’s wife is sinister in her attempts to inherit the family estate by conceiving a child. She is also extremely voluble about her thwarted desires and ambitions, and tries to analyze her problem by recapitulating with a long, gossipy account of high-school relationships, how they developed, to what degree they were pure, whom her husband loved and how he wouldn’t admit and why. The play is thus crammed with confession and avowal on a level (beauty-parlor or back-room) which makes you long for polite hypocrisy.

It is a longing which Brick, the “attractive” son, fulfills by his silence and refusal to unburden himself. He is not a character in the usual dramatic sense. We are told his history, as in a novel, the development of a latent homosexual into a wilful alcoholic. There is general agreement between author (by rhapsodic stage-direction) and other characters about his charm, defined enigmatically as the charm of the defeated. “So cool, so cool, so enviably cool,” says his wife ecstatically. When the play begins his main action is not to respond, though people rant, withhold drinks, take away a crutch and trip him up. The traditional gag of the dazed man who won’t react is blown up artificially, as a lizard to a movie dinosaur. From the beginning of Act II, Brick, with a minimum of lines and no action, is made the object of our mystified attention, exaggerated way out of proportion to his real interest or attraction. We leave the theatre with an awed sense of having been present at the worship of some sacred thing or totem animal.