Sienna strips, but is it just a box office-boosting ploy? QUENTIN LETTS's first night review of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

By Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail

Published: | Updated:

Sienna Miller starring as 'Maggie the cat' at the Apollo Theatre

Sienna Miller starring as 'Maggie the cat' at the Apollo Theatre

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (Apollo Theatre, London) 

Rating:

This will lose me points with the Leveson-supporting class but the chief reason for catching the new West End version of Tennessee Williams’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is seeing Sienna Miller remove her kit.

In these egalitarian times the lead man, Jack O’Connell, also parades his full Monty. It is rather more impressive than his Mississippi accent. 

Benedict Andrews’s production, set in the modern day rather than in Williams’s 1950s, is overdone. 

There is much shouting and smashing of furniture, a vast cake is destroyed and the stage is reduced to a terrible mess. 

This once again proves my pet theory that a messy stage is evidence of a struggling director.

There is more drama in repression – in violence checked – than in rampant destruction. But the set is striking: a vast, semi-reflective back wall of golden metal (tin?). 

Miss Miller plays ‘Maggie the cat’, sexually frustrated wife of sometime sports hero Brick (O’Connell) who has turned to drink. They are at the home of Brick’s millionaire redneck parents, Big Daddy and Big Mama.

Miller alongside co-star Jack O'Connell who plays her sports-hero husband Brick
O'Connell with Colm Meaney, who plays a Mississippi plantation owner

Miller alongside co-star Jack O'Connell, left, who plays her sports-hero husband Brick. O'Connell with Colm Meaney, right, who plays a Mississippi plantation owner

Our cartoonist Gary's take on the echoey performance of Sienna Miller in the new West End adaptation

Our cartoonist Gary's take on the echoey performance of Sienna Miller in the new West End adaptation

The core plot material about disapproval of homosexuality (Brick is secretly gay), which would have made sense in the 1950s, is hobbled by the modern setting. 

Of the supporting cast, several seem distinctly un-American. Lisa Palfrey’s Big Mama, hiding her mobile in her deep cleavage, is a successful creation, as is Hayley Squires’s Mae, but a visiting clergyman (Michael J. Shannon) resembles a West Country solicitor and Colm Meaney, though a gifted performer, is in no way a Mississippi plantation owner.

The family is unremittingly miserable. This is standard Williams. He is the laureate of undeserved unhappiness: rich people brimming with self-pity. Where is the joy in life? Where is the humanity of love? He wanted us all to share his glumness.

There is more drama in repression ¿ in violence checked ¿ than in rampant destruction. But the set is striking: a vast, semi-reflective back wall of golden metal (tin?)

There is more drama in repression – in violence checked – than in rampant destruction. But the set is striking: a vast, semi-reflective back wall of golden metal (tin?)

Miss Miller likes to complain about newspapers’ coverage of her life, insisting that she is more than a mere celebrity pin-up. I am not sure this performance quite clinches her case. She is a reasonable but hardly first-rate actress. 

Her voice is echoey to the point of inaudibility. Her Maggie keeps smiling weakly, which hardly seems feline. Would she really have been cast had she not been a gossip-column celeb? 

In the first half she strips to her underpants as Maggie tries to lure Brick. At the end, her disrobing may have less to do with the plot than it does in giving the audience a box-office boosting eyeful, her slender curves being silhouetted against the metallic backdrop almost like the credits for a James Bond film.

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Sienna Miller's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof review

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