Lesson Plans

Plays for study: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

In each issue of D&T we bring you an expert's guide to a play for study with your students. Here, Benjamin Hudson introduces an American classic: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams.
Jack O'Connell in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Young Vic, 2017 © JOHAN PERSSON

As one of the most explosive plays of the mid-20th-century, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof remains a frequently revived, essential play today. Cat won the Pultizer Prize for drama in 1955 and is a tragedy about a dying, wealthy cotton planter and the contest for inheritance between his heirs in 1950s Mississippi. Tennessee Williams's drama is notable for the poetry of its dialogue and the volcanic energy of major characters Big Daddy, Brick, and Margaret; it offers today's audiences a window into the cultural conventions and paranoid politics of the post-war period in the US, a reflection on the turbulence of American history, and a still-powerful meditation on mortality, social convention, desire and veracity.

Plot

The play takes place on the 65th birthday of ‘the [Mississippi] Delta's biggest cotton planter’ Big Daddy Pollitt, entirely in his younger son Brick's bedroom, where Brick is recovering after breaking his ankle in an early-morning drunken accident. After the suicide of his best friend and former team-mate Skipper, Brick has lost his job as a sports announcer, withdrawn all affection from his wife Margaret, and drowned his grief in bourbon; full of self-loathing for his refusal to comfort Skipper in a time of great need, Brick is a depressive in retreat from the world's hypocrisies and conventions.

Previously, Margaret's suspicions of Skipper's romantic feelings for her husband ignited a chain of events that led to Brick's withdrawal from his friend, Skipper's ultimate suicide, and Brick's contempt for a public world of superficialities. Having grown up poor, the tenacious Margaret is determined not to be shut out of Brick's father's estate by her calculating brother-in-law Gooper, his supercilious wife Mae, and their many children; Margaret still nurtures a powerful desire for her husband despite his coldness and alcoholism.

The final member of the Pollitt clan is Ida, Big Daddy's loyal wife, who has cared for him and his estate during his last several years of severe illness, and who, without a bequest articulating otherwise, stands to inherit the majority share of her husband's property.

The family has obscured the terminal diagnosis from Big Daddy and his wife, but as the play develops, Big Daddy faces the reality of his ever-closer death and struggles to break Brick out of his depression. The play ends as Margaret lies to her in-laws about a pregnancy in order to secure the estate – and the play closes with her ambiguous attempt to convince Brick to ‘make the lie true.’

Themes

The play was notable for addressing homosexuality on the 1950s Broadway stage, and 21st-century audiences can appreciate this audacity more by understanding the powerful mid-century conventions of gender and sexuality that weigh down upon Williams's characters. Writhing in the confines of mid-century white femininity, Margaret is forced to fight for her future through her husband Brick and his family; her counterfeit pregnancy underscores how well she understands the 1950's social imperative of motherhood. Brick is devastated by the transgressiveness of his friend Skipper's gay desire. After Skipper's death, Brick bemoans the entire edifice of social convention, while Margaret plots how to manipulate it to secure her future.

Set on a Mississippi plantation, Cat's setting calls attention to the long history of racialised terror and Black suffering in the American South and also to the white ‘gentility’ that terror and suffering enabled. The phrase ‘this place’ echoes throughout the play 14 times to showcase Williams's insistence on the relevance of setting.

The plot focuses on the drama of an elite white family, but shrewd stagings of the show remind us that the Pollitt family wealth was buttressed by a global economic system of slavery and racial exploitation. Mississippi's plantations were, of course, worked by enslaved people for over a century before Emancipation in 1865, and Big Daddy's economic rise relied on this history of enslaved labour.

© JOHAN PERSSON

Jack O'Connell and Sienna Miller in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Young Vic, 2017

What's more, Williams reveals the hollowness of American consumerism enabled by this historically brutal accumulation of wealth. By examining the Pollitt family's drinking, infighting and capacity for cruelty, Williams offers a powerful rebuke to the allure of American capitalism.

Influences

Williams had on his mind a subgenre of American fiction called the plantation novel, popular in the 1830s and 1840s. Typically, these stories were inheritance plots in which the continuation of an estate relied on the romances of a white slaveholding family. Williams radically inverts this genre and turns on its head the delusions of a genteel Antebellum South. From Margaret's self-association with the titular Cat to Mae and Gooper's ‘no-neck monsters,’ Williams's play is awash in the subhuman and the animal. In fact, Cat reveals a South constructed of lies, greed, alcoholism, and illness – a rot begotten from the sins of its past. Underneath the veneer of Southern gentility is a vicious battle for status and security, a world of ruthless competition for ill-gotten gains. The 1958 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman was a great success, and the play has been revived five times on Broadway and the West End in the 21st century.

Watch the Young Vic production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (2017) on National Theatre At Home here: http://ntathome.com/cat-on-a-hottin-roof