In Which the Cat Jumps

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is not a pleasant play to watch. Its chorus of screeches adds up to a cacophony that would make Beethoven in his later, hearing-impaired career cringe. To see its characters scratch and claw at one another makes the seat that one is sitting in very uncomfortable. It’s as though one’s bottom could sense the existential malaise that exudes from Tennessee William’s play and were compelling one to get up and escape the theater before the malaise escapes the stage from which it is emanating and reaches the audience.

Insofar as the theme of connectedness is concerned, Williams’ play is not so much about connecting as it is about already existing and tenuous connections falling apart, something that isn’t unfamiliar to Shakespeare’s readership. In King Lear, the tragic hero sees his relationship to his daughters fall apart as he discovers their true, malicious natures, until he rekindles his relationship with his previously forsaken daughter, who it turns out was the only one that truly loved the benighted old king. That Shakespeare cuts this newly rekindled love and connectedness extremely short through Cordelia’s execution can be overlooked for the sake of comparison with Williams’ play. The latter playwright could never allow such closure to creep into his drama. Bridges are never mended in Cat, they are only collapsing, and their debris gathers speed as it tumbles down the cliff that is its plot, until its shattering conclusion in which all connections, no matter how long they have existed (as in the case of the marriage of Big Daddy and Big Momma) are destroyed.

Shakespeare delighted in anagnorisis, particularly when it had to do with a revelation of mendacity. Othello concludes with the titular Moor realizing the deception of his confidante and friend Iago. The audience watches as Othello discovers what they have known all along and an enormous payoff is had. Finally, the deception is exposed, and the mendacious are made to stand in the light of truth. The characters of Cat are certainly made to stand, ultimately, in the light of truth, but it is a dim light, dimmed by the mendaciousness that exists within each and every one of its characters. There is no is no single Iago in Cat; Williams has written a whole cast of them. That mendaciousness extends from the family’s deception of Big Daddy into believing that his cancer has receded, to Brick, the main character, refusing to recognize his own latent homosexual desires and vehemently denying them to all who insinuate them. In the end, the mendacity is all exposed, from Goober and Kate kissing up to Big Daddy simply to inherit his estate, to the fact that Brick’s and Maggie’s marriage is simply a lavender veil for Brick’s homosexuality. Unlike, Shakespeare, though, the characters do not revel in the discovery of the mendacity; rather, they wallow in it. There is no indication—none—to suggest that anything will be improved by the series of violent revelations that constitutes the play’s plot.

One wonders what Forster would have had to say to the characters of Cat. I personally cannot think of a group of people more needing his advice from Howard’s End, that is: “Only connect.”