Hugo Weaving in STC's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (photograph by Daniel Boud)

The problems stem, almost exclusively, from Williams the director’s complete lack of faith in Williams the playwright. It manifests immediately, as Maggie (Zahra Newman) opens the play singing ‘Cry Me a River’ while Brick (Harry Greenwood) showers in a transparent glass box. The production has to signal that Maggie has been crying a river over her drunkard husband, because nothing in Newman’s performance indicates it. She has the toughest gig of the night, in many ways: she has to set the atmospheric tenor, find the vocal rhythms, and establish the character dynamics of a very long play with several exhausting monologues, all while her husband watches on with studied indifference. Newman’s approach intends to underline the character’s firecracker determination, to illustrate physically the play’s titular metaphor, but it comes across as merely desperate.

She isn’t aided by Greenwood’s Brick, a character that heaves with the self-annihilation and soul-crushing ennui of the playwright at his most destructive, but who presents here as simply sullen and charmless. He seems to have taken his character’s name as a personality descriptor, and while it’s unfair to say that an actual brick would have made a better sparring partner for the jittery impetuosity of Newman’s Maggie, it’s clear after a few minutes watching them argue that the chemistry, both sexual and psychological, is never going to catch alight. Curiously, at least in the first act, Maggie drinks more than the nominally alcoholic Brick; it’s another directorial decision that wilfully rejects the playwright’s stated intention, for a result that is more bemusing than insightful.

Zahra Newman and Harry Greenwood in STC’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (photograph by Daniel Boud)

The play’s second act is almost entirely taken up with an exhaustive and penetrating conversation between father and son, the thematic and dramaturgical nexus of the work. But those promised sparks don’t fly here, either. Greenwood tilts his characterisation from the impassive to the maudlin, his voice sliding from husky to whining, and Weaving dominates the stage in a way that seems, from a meta-theatrical perspective, almost perverse. It’s enough to wish the director had cast total strangers in the roles.

In general, the older generation of actors fare better than the younger in this play about the ambivalence of heredity, which serves to accentuate their grip on power even while the structures shift beneath them. Weaving is a towering, monstrous presence as Big Daddy, bellowing his way around the cavernous space like a wounded bear. In a play where everyone is nicknamed Big Mama, Sister Woman, or Brother Man, it’s significant that Big Daddy’s real name is the only one never mentioned. He is the paterfamilias from hell, a blustering bully whose occasional flickers of compassion only serve to highlight his otherwise consuming egomania. Pamela Rabe’s Big Mama is initially almost as monstrous as her husband – at least in her scraping obsequiousness – but she grows, if not in gravitas then in grit. Both performances skirt the bounds of taste and both trip into outright melodrama in key moments, but they have the benefit of a kind of epic grandeur, an operatic quality that lifts the often leaden mood.

Harry Greenwood and Pamela Rabe in STC’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (photograph by Daniel Boud)

The greatest monstrosities of the evening, however, belong not to the actors but to the designers. David Fleischer’s set might photograph well but is in reality a deadening, impractical blight. Random pieces of furniture in shades of charcoal and dark grey lie strewn across the stage as if they’d fallen off the back of a removalist’s van, and a hideous funnel towers over the space like a misplaced ship metaphor. Nick Schlieper’s lighting design is, for the most part, cold and clinical – the kind of light Blanche recoils from in A Streetcar Named Desire – but then the fireworks of Act Two start up, and all restraint is forsaken. A massive wall of gold searchlights blinds the audience intermittently, accompanied by the dying fall of a party trumpet, as if the piercing revelations of the play required their own audio-visual signposts. Again, it reveals nothing but a lack of faith.

Kip Williams is a talented and often exciting director, unafraid to challenge a play in order to unlock its untapped secrets, but something has gone horribly wrong here. There’s a sense that this endeavour looked so sound on paper that nobody thought to ask the fundamental questions: namely, why this play, and why now? The program notes twist the paper they’re written on to explain the directorial decisions, but they come to nothing when the actors step onto the Roslyn Packer stage. For a play that skewers the lies and half-truths families tell each other, it’s painful to watch a production so avoidant and contrived. When Big Daddy asks Brick what the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof might be, he answers, ‘Well, just staying on it, I guess.’ You could apply the metaphor to everyone involved in this misguided production, and still not get to the bone-wearying disappointment at its heart.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is being produced by Sydney Theatre Company at the Roslyn Packer Theatre from 29 April to 8 June 2019.