Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Seeing as we are some way off from having a black British producer hire a black director to stage an all-star black British production of a literary classic in the West End, it's no surprise that the Americans got there first. What is surprising, however, is how little race matters in this Broadway transfer (which uses Tennessee Williams's own 1974 revision of his play). Of course, by recasting the story of a white plantation-owning family in 1950s Mississippi to a black one in the 1980s, director Debbie Allen adds weight to the question of ownership and power. References to the freeing of family slaves are whitewashed and Big Daddy, Williams's tower of calcified bitterness and misogynistic fervour, is a light-skinned black man instead of a rednecked white one. But a dysfunctional family is a dysfunctional family regardless of race, place or time.

Veteran actor James Earl Jones is perfectly cast as Big Daddy although his delivery sometimes lacks the impact of his colossal physical presence. His family have gathered to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday, but as everyone except him knows he is dying of cancer, this is really a Berlin Conference-style meeting to carve up his multi-billion-dollar empire. Charging about his faded palace like a wounded bull, he takes vicious jabs at his long-suffering wife Big Mamma (played with desperate devotion by 'Cosby Show' star Phylicia Rashad).

Only his favourite son, Brick, a former sports star who has slumped into an alcoholic stupor following the death of his best friend, garners any sort of respect from him. Adrian Lester brings a hardened indifference to Brick, who self-anaesthetises to overcome the turmoil over his sexuality. As his undersexed, overzealous wife, Maggie, Sanaa Lathan lacks the range required to hold the epic first act together. Allen's slightly soft-focus production is sometimes prone to sentimentality and comedy where there should be noxious anger. But the powerful second act duologue between Brick and Big Daddy packs a big enough emotional punch to carry the production home.