"Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", West End, Autumn 2001

Bill Kenwright presents
"Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"

REVIEWS and Press Cuttings (most recent at the top of the page)

latest revision on this page:-
Thursday 13th December 2001

Theatre Record Issue XXI - front cover

Many of the reviews on this page (but not all, and not the on-line or US ones) are printed in the Theatre Record, issue XXI (Productions from 9-13 September 2001), along with photographs of this and other productions. Details of Theatre Record are available on their website on www.theatrerecord.com

All reviews are provided for information only, and may be removed on request from the copyright holders.

(I just found this one, parked it here, and will put it in date order later.)

The New London Independent, October 12th 2001 www.londonlocals.co.uk
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
with Duncan Williams
CAT on a Hot Tin Roof, currently running at the Lyric in Shaftesbury Avenue, London, is yet another version of the famous Tennessee Williams play that, thanks to Liz Taylor and Paul Newman, has become etched on our collective psyche.
This production wins on several levels, principally due to the performances by Ned Beatty as the family patriarch and Frances O'Connor as his wily, sex-starved daughter-in-law. Although it was written in the 1950's, the play is startlingly fresh. Much more graphic and exploratory of its underlying subject matter than the 60's: film, looking unblinkingly at repressed homosexuality and alcoholism, this production benefits from a beautiful set, so inviting and realistic that you are almost transported to a southern plantation house, complete with Mississippi breezes and mosquitos.
When Maggie first appears on stage, strutting and preening in desperation, you worry that O'Connor will be unable to fill the shoes of the voluptuous Taylor. Yet, O'Connor's performance broadens and deepens with each line she utters so that eventually her inherent fragility and wistfulness become as much a part of Maggie as the character's famed cunning and resilience.
Brendan Fraser is slightly less successful as Brick, her booze-soaked husband. This role has most often been played with aloof dignity. Witness Paul Newman's icy detachment in the film version. More recently, Ian Charleson, in a late 80's London production, played Brick with mildly disdainful reticence, as if he were the elegant prisoner of this crude and noisy household. Fraser, on the other hand, despite or perhaps because of his powerful stage presence, plays the role with an unexpected departure from this reserve. At times his animation and athleticism threaten to upstage the drama, adding an unintentional comic aspect to the play, so that when he falls over and flails time and time again for his crutches, the character's physical vulnerability; so subtly portrayed by previous actors, comes off as slapstick.
Not all the funniness is unintentional, of course, and Ned-Beatty, blustering and big-bellied, is spot on as Big Daddy, simultaneously menacing and comic in his longing for more life and in his desperation to retain power within this family. His wife, played by Gemma Jones, is overshadowed by his strong performance, but she too is believable in her clumsy, thwarted desire to mean something to him.
The term 'dysfunctional family' takes on a whole new meaning with the intricacies of each character's relation to one another, and we squirm with discomfort when Big Daddy confronts Brick on his sexuality, and when Maggie lies that she has managed to become pregnant by her unresponsive husband. These moments of confrontation and deception have since been done a thousand times by every soap opera, but it is the power of Williams's dialogue that makes such scenes transcend cliche in our jaded era. This version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a polished, entertaining, and mostly successful version of the famed play, and witnessing the awakening talent of its younger actors is an education in the enormous difference between the skills used for film acting and for stage acting. Lovers of Williams's work should certainly go and see the production, provided they leave the iconic images of Newman and Taylor behind.

A CurtainUp London Review Curtainup.com website
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
by Lizzie Loveridge
In 1955 the original production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award in 1955 for Tennessee Williams. The filmed study of a dysfunctional family fighting over an inheritance in the Mississippi Delta famously featured Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. The current revival is that all too rare benchmark event, a finely written play, adroitly directed with excellent performances, sensitively lit and beautifully set.
(by request, visit the website direct for the remainder of this review, now in the archive section)

SX Magazine, Wednesday December 5th 2001 SX Magazine website
CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF - Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, W1
Big shoes to fill? No doubt about it. When watching this largely star-driven production of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, who can help but compare Frances O'Connor with Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie, or Brendan Fraser with Paul Newman as Brick? It isn't fair of course, especially when these two leads have drawn not at all on these classic characterisations.
Those who are expecting Fraser to reprise his loveable grin are in for a surprise; those who have come to expect O'Connor to be fearless are not. It is extra tough for these two once Ned Beatty as Big Daddy and Gemma Jones as Big Mamma take the stage. They are simply wonderful. Beatty is especially fine bringing all his bassy resonance to bear in playing one of the great grouches of the modern stage, while Jones oozes class as an unusually but refreshingly horrible matron.
Director Anthony Page can't help but steal the show, too. There's no too-clever-by-half ironic suggestiveness here, but big broad brush strokes, easily filling Maria Björnson's cavernous, decaying set.
James Mullighan

TNT Magazine, Monday December 3rd 2001 TNT Magazine website
Frances goes to Hollywood
With an impressive collection of film roles to her name, Frances O'Connor should have added fame to the widespread critical acclaim that accompanies her movies. REBECCA BROWN finds the Australian actress looking ahead.

TNT Magazine Dec 3rd 2001

She may be well known by movie buffs, actors and directors the world over, yet it seems the general public hasn't the foggiest idea who she is. She's played alongside a string of great actors including Cate Blanchett, Jude Law and Kate Hudson and was hand-picked by Steven Spielberg, no less to play the mother of the robot boy in Artificial Intelligence: A I. By all rights, Frances O'Connor should be a household name - but curiously, she's not. O'Connor is somewhat enigmatic. She's been described as "extremely shy in person" and even lacking the qualities that make good interviews. One could easily assume her low profile status was self-control led. This, I discover, couldn't be further from the truth. Entering the Lyric Theatre dressing room, where O'Connor currently stars opposite Brendan Fraser in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, I am greeted with a warm smile. She is welcoming and at ease, wearing no make-up and dressed in casual, black clothes. I soon get the feeling I'm visiting a good friend rather than a burgeoning superstar. Eager to clarify just how well known O'Connor is, I ask if she gets recognised on the streets in London.
TNT Magazine Dec 3rd 2001 - photo of Brendan Fraser with Frances O'Connor

TNT Magazine Dec 3rd 2001 - photo of Brendan Fraser with Frances O'Connor

"No, not really. Sometimes I get recognised for doing the play or Mansfield Park" she says. "Not really for A I. Sometimes for other Australian movies I've done. But I've never been recognised on the streets for A I." O'Connor first made her mark in the Australian film industry as Mia, a lesbian uni student in the surprise hit Love And Other Catastrophes. Her next movie was the critically acclaimed Kiss Or Kill in which she played Nikki, a crazy con artist who goes on a rampage of destruction with her lover. Her feisty performance helped land her the Best Actress Award at the I997 Montreal Film Festival. Suddenly in hot demand, the film offers rolled in. She put in a credible performance in Thank God He Met Lizzie, the movie that made Cate Blanchett, and then starred with Geoffrey Rush in the quaint but fun A Little Bit Of Soul. Although her acting career was well established in Australia, O'Connor found breaking into the overseas market no easy ride. "That was really tough actually; I thought it was going to be a lot easier," she relates. I thought people were going to say 'ah, you're Frances O'Connor, please come in', but it was actually like 'who are you? Ah yeah, you've done a few Australian movies - we don't really care'." She laughs. "I just thought 'well, that's OK, that's a challenge, let's just see what happens' and I ended up getting into some good films."
"Good films" is some understatement considering her first non-Australian films were Mansfield Park, About Adam (with Kate Hudson), Bedazzled (with Brendan Fraser an Liz Hurley) and A I (with Jude Law). O'Connor's detailed performance as Fanny Price in Mansfield Park was well received by critics and audiences alike, but perhaps most importantly, it was the film in which Spielberg first noticed her. The daddy of all directors approached her to be the leading lady in his futuristic fairytale, A I.
It was a bit surreal really," she admits. I could hardly believe I was there the entire time I was shooting it. It was great, I really liked Steven, he's inspiring to work with because he's got a great imagination, and he's got great creativity. When you're working with him you find his energy very infectious." With the recent completion of a further two films, World War II flick Windtalkers and a new version of Oscar Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnest, O'Connor's career is set to move up a gear yet again. In Oliver Parker's take on The Importance Of Being Earnest, O'Connor plays Gwendolen Fairfax, and can hardly hide her enthusiasm for the film and its all-star cast. It was such a great cast. I think it's going to be a great film. Last year I did all American movies, so this year to just be in England and work with the likes of Judi Dench, Rupert Everett, Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon was absolutely fantastic," she says.
It was shot over the summer in this big, old country house. Judi Dench was great; she would drive around in this little buggy golf cart from her trailer up to the set. Her character's Lady Bracknell, so we put the 'Brack-mobile' on it," she giggles. "And people would get lifts from her. But she went very fast so not many people wanted to go on it! She's a lovely lady." It appears that not even the likes of the Damester herself could intimidate the cool O'Connor. "By the time we're filming I've worked so much on my character that I've got something to concentrate on. So I don't really get nervous around famous people. You kind of feel like you've met them anyway because you've seen their faces on screen," she says.
Although the film industry is notoriously competitive, plenty of Aussie actors are doing well in Hollywood, and O'Connor has her own theory on what gives them their edge. I think we've got a lot of energy," she says. "The Australian personality is very life embracing, very kind of open, and they're two very attractive qualities. There's a kind of honesty to the Australian character which is good for acting, because acting is about truth."
O'Connor was born in England when her father was studying for a PhD at Oxford University. The family returned to Australia when she was two, and settled in Perth. Working in the West End, she now lives in Notting Hill with her boyfriend of eight years, actor-playwright Gerald Lepkowski.
"I love it here, there's always something to do, there's always new people coming into London," she says. "There's always some-thing going on in terms of music and art. it's a very stimulating city." Clearly she misses home and, in particular, Melbourne, where she spent her post-university years.
I miss all my little cafes I used to go to with friends, good coffee - a good Melbourne latte," she says. "I just miss my friends and my family. I was going to go home before the play, but ran out of preparation time, so I wasn't able to." And it's equally evident that the glittering lights of Hollywood haven't lured her to a celebrity life in LA.
" Oh, I couldn't live there!" she exclaims. "The best thing is to go there for three months, and then work, and then it's the most fantastic, fun place to live - but not for too long. I think you can get jaded easily. It can be a bit fake after a while." Time is running short with curtain call an hour away. Not wanting to overstay my welcome, I offer to leave so she can get ready for another emotional performance. "Sure," she says. It's been lovely to chat, but I should do my yoga - I often do it before the show. It really helps."

(South Bay LA) Daily Breeze, Friday November 23rd 2001 Daily Breeze website
Brendan Fraser rediscovers calling on London stage
BY JIM FARBER
THEATER CRITIC
LONDON - Brendan Fraser is so tired he can hardly keep his head up. Occasionally his words slur, and he looks like he might fall asleep at any moment. The cause, however, is not what you might expect from the popular action hero of the silver screen. Fraser is not worn out from a tough day spent slaying mummies, saving damsels in distress or swinging through the jungle. He's wrung out - physically and emotionally - because he's just completed the last of eight shows a week on the London stage. Since early September, the Lyric Theatre off Piccadilly Circus has been Fraser's home away from home. And it's there, to the amazement of some, that Fraser has garnered a string of rave reviews for his performance as Brick - the mentally distraught, whiskey-swilling, sexually conflicted central character in Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
It's a role that requires Fraser to be on stage for almost every moment of the play's three-hour running time. And today's been especially hard, because he's had to go through the knock-down-drag-out drama not once, but twice. But, as Fraser says, with a weak smile, it's all part of the learning experience that comes with serious theater work.
As an American actor performing in London's West End for the first time, Fraser says playing Brick represents the "satisfying and fulfilling culmination of a childhood dream." At the same time, he admits it's been something of a trial by combat, from which, he's convinced, he's emerging a stronger, more discerning and better actor. "Killing mummies is great. And God knows it pays wonderfully. But doing this show has given me a lot more confidence and satisfaction - that feeling that I've earned a stripe just from the sheer force of doing the work."
In addition to Fraser, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" stars American actor Ned Beatty (as Big Daddy), Australian actress Frances O'Connor (as Brick's sex-starved wife, "Maggie the Cat"); and British actress Gemma Jones (as Big Mama).
It represents a relatively new trend in London theater, the latest in a string of high-powered West End presentations of classic American plays by Williams and Eugene O'Neill that feature marquee Hollywood talent. And, according to the manager of the Lyric Theatre, it's a formula for success that's been responsible for attracting a whole new audience to the West End.
It's a list of productions that includes Kevin Spacey's performance as Hickey in "The Iceman Cometh" Jessica Lange, first as Blanche DuBois in "A Streetcar Named Desire," then as Mary Tyrone in "Long Day's Journey Into Night" and now Fraser's Brick. "We've been giving eight shows a week to 900 people. And we've been lucky enough to play to full houses. A lot of other shows have really suffered due to world events," Fraser points out, as the sound of passersby and the traffic on Shaftesbury Avenue filters up through a window.
From the beginning there was little doubt that Fraser's name would sell tickets. The more significant question was whether Fraser had the right stuff to hold his own as a stage actor in London?
Casting Fraser meant taking a decided risk, considering that his last appearance on stage was in 1995, when he co-starred with Martin Short in the light-weight comedy "Four Dogs and a Bone" at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. Even Fraser admits, compared to what he's doing now, that role was a no-brainer.
"That was a little bit like shooting fish in a barrel," he says, as he tries to spread out in the tiny reception room adjacent to his equally small, no-frills dressing room. "We were doing a play about Hollywood, in Hollywood, when everyone from Hollywood was there, watching each other instead of the play."
It was Sir Ian McKellen, the renowned British actor (with whom Fraser starred in the film "Gods and Monsters") that suggested him (forcefully) for the part of Brick. And looking back, Fraser says he can see how fate played a hand in bringing him to this pivotal moment in his life and career.
"Me and dumb luck - it's always been on my side," he says. "When it looked like there was going to be a strike in Hollywood, it left a period of non-production. I'd just finished shooting a film called `The Quiet American' (currently on hold by Miramax, with no release date scheduled). It was Ian who told the producer of `Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,' Bill Kenwright to call me. It was Ian who did that for me," Fraser says with affection. " `See Brendan for Brick,' " he told them.
It's a relationship, Fraser says, that actually began long before the two ever met. "I had tried to get on his film `Richard III,' " Fraser explains, in an effort to connect the dots. "But Ian never knew, because I couldn't get by his evil casting director. That woman just wouldn't let me get near the project.
"I remember this humiliating meeting where she made me read the menu at this outdoor cafe with a British accent - even though the part I was reading for was meant to be played by an American! Long story - cruel Hollywood. Fie! Fie!" he quips.
"Anyway, I decided I was going to go over her head, and I wrote a letter directly to Ian letting him know who I was, because he didn't know me from a bar of soap. He got it. He sent me a note back that said, `I don't have a part for you. But, I really could use some of your much-needed enthusiasm. Call it fate, whatever, a few years down the road that letter came in handy when we met for `Gods and Monsters,' and recalled how we'd crossed paths before. Out of that our friendship was born." A lot of Hollywood friendships, though, last only as long as a film's shooting schedule. This one, Fraser says, was different.
"We breakfasted together. We read books together. He told me who he was. And I did the same. In some ways we lived the best aspects of what that movie was about. I learned a lot from Sir."
There were times, however, when Fraser was preparing to play Brick, that he wasn't sure McKellen had done him any kind of favor. He soon realized he'd taken on an acting challenge that was way beyond anything he'd faced before. Which, Fraser suspects, was exactly what McKellen had in mind for him.
"This play doesn't work unless you go hell bent for leather the whole time. Even in rehearsal there was blood on the floor," he adds with a laugh. "But that kind of effort pays off in the long run.
"I quickly wore out all my usual bag of actor tricks," he admits, candidly. "You know, the kind of thing where you mine your worst memories - blah, blah, blah. After a while that just doesn't work - you burn that candle out. That's when you have to rely on the people you're up there working with. Luckily, there's a very supportive environment in this cast. With British actors its not about stars, it's all about the work.
"Don't misunderstand me. I love making films," Fraser says, emphatically. "But it's a completely different discipline. You have to have the ability to chart a performance that's so out of order. You have to hit the ball out of the park, when you may only have two or three chances in a scene. That's a skill that's learned."
Even so, Fraser recognizes he's made a few real "Monkey Bone"-headed decisions in choosing film roles. And if his London theater experience has taught him anything, he says, it's to be more selective, and to build upon what he's learned.
"I do feel like I'm a different person. I just wonder who that person is," he muses. "I'll have to see by the end of January, when `Cat' is scheduled to close. I think that's probably the reason I haven't made up my mind about what I want to do next. The most important thing, is that doing this show, I've gotten back to the reasons why I wanted to act in the first place."

(Boston, Mass.) Boston Herald, Sunday November 18th 2001
THEATER; London stage scene surviving economic uncertainty by Stephen Schaefer.
The theater, that perpetually fabulous invalid with homes on Broadway and in London's West End, is bouncing back after the Sept. 11 attacks and the international war on terrorism decimated tourism and business travel.
"We are doing fine, but some shows, those that are dependent on tourists, are not," Sir Peter Hall told the packed house at London's Haymarket Theater before a recent performance of his revival of the 1927 American showbiz satire, "The Royal Family." That sentiment was echoed on this side of the Atlantic. Sure, Broadway's new season is going full throttle just miles from Ground Zero. It already has premiered several hits - from the starry Strindberg revival "Dance of Death" with Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen to the TV-starry revival of Clare Booth Luce's 1936 "The Women" with Cynthia Nixon, Kristen Johnston, Rue McClanahan and Jennifer Tilly and the ABBA musical that recently played in Boston, "Mamma Mia!" But long-running stalwarts such as "The Phantom of the Opera," "Beauty and the Beast" and "Les Miserables" need tourists, especially non-English-speaking ones, to continue.
London may be 3,000 miles from the World Trade Center, but the tragedies of Sept. 11 were devastating to West End box offices.
Brendan Fraser, who stars in a first-rate hit revival of Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" at the Lyric Theater (with Frances O'Connor, his "Bedazzled" co-star, as Maggie the Cat), says, "I found out (about the WTC) as we were doing a photo shoot, getting the pictures for publicity, on the stage. I think the photographers realized they should have been at 10 Downing Street," the residence of Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Ned Beatty, who plays Big Daddy in "Cat," added "It didn't hit me at first. Being in the theater and doing a play is like joining a religious order, you don't let the outside world in. But Brendan was freaked. He was really feeling it. We went on that night; he didn't want to walk away, but it was harder for him."
Others concurred that the show must go on. "I think what we have seen in times like these is the need for entertainment, for people to go out and find comfort in plays, in art, in movies," said Dame Judi Dench, who stars in "The Royal Family."
The Royal National Theatre, which is in repertory with three stages, has on its largest, the Olivier, a handsome revival of John Osborne's '60s religious drama, "Luther," boosted by Rufus Sewell's tour de force as Martin Luther.
Alan Rickman, who plays Snape, the dangerous professor of potions in the new Harry Potter movie, shows his debonair side in an SRO revival of Noel Coward's classic sophisticated comedy "Private Lives" at the Albery. Opposite his Elyot as Amanda, a role previously played by Maggie Smith, Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Collins, is Lindsay Duncan, who was Rickman's leading lady on stage in "Dangerous Liaisons."
What's compelling about this "Lives" and Fraser's "Cat" is how, without changing the texts, these revivals reveal the plays in an entirely new way.
In "Lives" the madly destructive love Elyot and Amanda have for each other is shown not in the usually madcap way but with an awareness of the loneliness and heartache such a love can bring.
"Cat" playwright Tennessee Williams complained that since the classic '50s movie version with Taylor and Paul Newman, "Cat" has always been seen as a play about Maggie, the wife who wants to get her husband back into the marriage bed. Under Anthony Page's direction, Williams' true intentions are much clearer: "Cat" is about communication, especially, in its superb second act, communication between a gay son and his loving father. This is probably the first time a production of "Cat" brings tears rather than leers.

New York Times, Sunday 11th November 2001
..... has led some to conclude that escapist comedy is what London audiences currently crave. But "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof," at the Lyric Theater, is a hot enough ticket to contradict that. True, Williams's Deep South saga has its comic moments, especially when the dramatist brings onstage caricatures of inheritance-hunters and their awful children; but neither the impending death of the object of their greed, Big Daddy Pollitt, nor the despair of the old man's favorite son seems particularly hilarious.
Death and despair do, however, seem particularly real: testimony not only to Anthony Page's meticulous production but to the quality of the performers he has persuaded to take a break from their movie careers. Frances O'Connor is Maggie, the precariously placed feline female of the play's title. Brendan Fraser is her husband, Brick, a boy-man for whom bourbon is the main escape both from his own repressed homosexuality and from Maggie's nagging attempts to stop his ostentatiously sober brother from inheriting the family plantation. And Ned Beatty is Big Daddy, the patriarch who is brutally informed by Brick that the pain in his guts comes from cancer, not a spastic colon.
Ms. O'Connor doesn't flaunt her sensuality. as Elizabeth Taylor did in the film of the play, but you don't doubt the intensity of a frustration that is sexual as well as practical. Neither her charm, which is great, nor her intelligence, which is greater, can bounce her neglectful husband out of the emotional magnolias. You can see why she and her father-in-law like each other. They are two survivors who have known poverty and have got where they are now through the mental toughness so maddeningly missing in Brick. Indeed, what is refreshing about Mr. Beatty's performance is that he isn't content to show us the mythic cotton-king, the Mississipi minotaur or Delta titan. His Big Daddy is the one-time overseer who wangled his way to riches and power: a shrewd, practical, even sensitive man who may bully his wife and talk coarsely yet strains to understand his son and woo him from his bottle.
As a result, the climactic encounter between Mr. Beatty and Mr. Fraser's Brick, a defeated hulk adrift in a sea of booze, is as compelling as anything now in the London theater. The father's dogged prodding penetrates the son's imperturbability, some inner fuse ignites, the wreck turns wrecker, and all the suppressed anger and self-hatred explodes in a display of frantic vindictiveness. Williams once said that of all his plays "Cat" was his favorite and that of all his scenes this was the one in which he had most "reached beyond myself." After seeing Mr. Beatty and Mr. Fraser's intimate stag-battle, I believe him.

Spectator, Saturday 29th September 2001 - Sheridan Morley
The autumn season for the West End opens in a difficult international time, but is off to a dramatic start with Anthony Page's rare revival of Tennessee Williams's steaming, deep-southern, Kentucky-fried Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Lyric. 0riginally written as a sequence of short stories in 1954, and endlessly rewritten for stage and screen thereafter, this is the one about Maggie the Cat and the no-neck monsters and Big Daddy, and is often in danger nowadays of looking like the pilot for Dallas or Dynasty.
Indeed, when it was last staged, by the National in 1988 in a laughably English convention with the late Eric Porter as the unlikeliest of Big Daddies, I thought we might have to give up the play for good as locally unrevivable. But Anthony Page - like Michael Blakemore one of those great craftsmen-directors whose fame has been overtaken by younger and flashier whizz-kids with eyes on Hollywood - now brings the play back to us, no longer as the three-star bisexual hothouse it once was, but instead as a great domestic, gothic melodrama in the tradition of Lillian Hellman and The Little Foxes. The wrought-iron screens of Williams's Deep South may still be looking dreadfully overwrought, and there are still dangerous moments in the first act, when Cat starts to look like offcuts from a Truman Capote gossip column, but this is still the route by which the American theatre got from Long Day's Journey to Virginia Woolf, and its restored power is again mesmeric.
Apart from Mr Page, the great star of this evening is Ned Beatty in his London stage debut, the first Big Daddy to banish forever the memories of Burl Ives in this role on stage and screen. The King Lear of the Mississippi Delta, he lifts the play off the ground at his every belated appearance, and often neatly puts it back where he found it on his way out. A white James Earl Jones, the man is a gentle giant of evil intent, with all the lazy charm of an over-weight cobra, and around him Page and his producer Bill Kenwright have gathered an amazing team of character actors: Gemma Jones as Big Mamma, Abigail McKern as the predatory, ever-pregnant Mae, Clive Carter as the creepy elder brother and David Firth as the preacher man all manage to make you believe that they were born and will die in the Delta.
Which leaves only the problem of the two central roles: Brendan Fraser and Frances O'Connor, both movie stars in London stage debuts, have the terrible task of trying to banish Paul Newman and Liz Taylor from the memory, and that they fail is not entirely their fault. They also have to cope with a team of the aforementioned character actors, hallmarked as they are with a brittle and brilliant confidence that can come only from years on stage. There is thus an odd kind of vacuum at the centre, one which may well disappear as the stars grow in West End confidence over the coming months.

Jewish Chronicle, Friday 28th September 2001 - John Nathan
I've rarely seen such a fine performance from an actor whose character spends so much time on stage, saying so little, as Brendan Fraser's in Tennessee William's Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. As former football player Brick, he is a study of resigned boredom shot with repressed shame about his homosexuality.
There are no weak links in Anthony Page's perfectly paced production at the Lyric. Next to her silently drunk hero of a husband, Frances O'Connor's Margaret is a gabbling foil of desperation as she attempts to hold on to the hope that her marriage can somehow produce the child she needs.
And Ned Beatty is both bullying and touchingly sensitive as Brick's father, Big Daddy, a patriarchal Mississippi plantation-owner. Where Page is so successful is in winding the play up to a perfect pitch of dramatic, Southern heat until it climaxes in the reconciliation scene between Brick and Big Daddy, whose cancer produces a fear of death that sweeps aside his redneck sensibilities. Illness is the catalyst for the home truths that sweep through the house.
There's excellent support from Clive Carter, as Brick's older and mercenary brother, and especially from Abigail McKern's "monster of fertility", whose children goad the childless Margaret. Gemma Jones is Big Mamma, who crumbles under her husband's disdain.
This is a wonderfully taut evening of family tension, and the moody Brendan Fraser (last seen in the movie, "The Mummy") is a pure star quality.

TIME OUT - 26th September 2001 - Jane Edwardes
Tennessee Williams' plays are invariably overwritten and overpitched, but in the best of them the black humour and the eloquent expression of emotional intensity make the long journey worth while. In 'Cat', the playwright pitches those who love life against those who are indifferent to it, the thin-skinned against the thick-skinned, and the idealists against the pragmatic and greedy. The great virtue of Anthony Page's production is to get the balance right between Brick and Maggie's despair, and the comedy of family life on the plantation where hatred and avarice seethe behind the respectable, wealthy front. Nobody can be as cruel as Abigail McKern's Mae when she thrusts her pregnant stomach in the childless Maggie's face. Mae and Gooper, two grotesque caricatures, are joined only in their desire to inherit the estate as they parade their many children, their 'no-neck monsters', in front of Big Daddy. McKern's twisted face is the one to watch as Maggie unexpectedly announces that she is pregnant.
Fears that Frances O'Connor and Brendan Fraser had been cast only for their box-office appeal prove ungenerous. O'Connor, who turned Jane Austen's timid Fanny in 'Mansfield Park' into a spirited rebel, now has a real fighter to play in Maggie, restlessly prowling the stage, seeking reassurance in an invisible mirror, and baring her soul to her implacable husband whose only response is to reach for the bottle. In the roaring second act, Ned Beatty's bruising Big Daddy gnaws away like a terrier as he attacks Brick's indifference. The reaction of Fraser's Brick is to brush the air away from his head, as if pursued by invisible furies: his guilt that he rejected his friend; his disgust at others' reaction to his friendship; and his denial that that friendship might have been more than he would like to admit. It's a shame that Page felt the West End audience needed the reassurance of Williams' sentimental rewrites for Broadway, but it's a minor quibble given such a thunderous evening.

WHAT'S ON 26th September 2001 - Roger Foss
A hot summer night in a bedroom in the American South has never been so fraught with sexual tension and family misfortune as in Tennessee Williams' gothic melodrama Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. Set in a faded anti-bellum mansion haunted by ghosts of the past, secrets and lies emerge from the Mississippi mud while terminally ill plantation owner Big Daddy's inheritance of "20,000 acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile" is fought over by his grasping family. At its heart, this emotionally charged play is about the human capacity for mendacity, or "lies and lying" as Big Daddy forcefully describes the word. But the honest truth is that the roof in Anthony Page's starry production is hardly warm enough for a pussycat to curl up on.
Page and his actors mostly capture the wicked humour and caged desperation of the piece and yet they leave you having to imagine the "thundercloud of a common crisis" and the mystery of the human interior that Williams himself was so intrigued by. Still, the acting is generally strong enough to maintain interest on this guided tour of Tennessee country inhabited by trapped fugitives from reality, ranging from Hollywood veteran Ned Beatty's terrific pit bull of a Big Daddy, who sinks his cancerous teeth into the, corrupting system of mendacity that makes his family tick, to Gemma Jones' gushing Big Mamma, and a line-up of over-fed "no-neck monster" grandchildren who perform a gruesome birthday dance in Big Daddy's honour.
Spitting into her mascara and rarely standing still, Frances O'Connor's mirror-fixated Maggie, the 'cat' of the title, exudes sexual anxiety In the long opening scene with her Impotent husband Brick, a broken idealist who limps around on a crutch while boozing himself to an early grave after the suicide of his close sporting buddie, Skipper.
By contrast with O'Connor's feline on heat Brendan Fraser, of The Mummy Returns fame, verges on becoming catatonic as the drink--sodden, guilt-ridden, homosexually-repressed' Brick, which does leave you wondering if this fallen hero was ever athletic enough to swing both ways in bed. Any subtle psycho-sexual turmoil is definitely kept under the sheets.

Scotsman, Wednesday 26th September 2001 - Kate Copstick
THERE are "givens" in Tennessee Williams - families come direct from hell, no-one is happy, sex is fraught, love is destructive and, where two or more are gathered together in his name, at least one is a tortured homo-sexual. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has the lot.
This was a good, but not a great production. it suffered from the feeling that there was, backstage somewhere, a flashing neon sign that warns "Acting In Progress". And there is some good acting in progress. But it looks like and sounds like acting, so when the tears come - and they certainly do - they didn't touch me. Only the stocky, earthily wonderful Ned Beatty as Big Daddy really inhabited his role. His liver and kidneys are riddled with cancer but his heart is stronger than the Echo Spring bourbon Brendan Fraser's Brick was using as emotional anaesthetic. He also has an emotional range that verges on the bi-polar.
Fraser, on the other hand, seems to have taken his character's name a tad literally. I didn't believe he was tortured by anything except the journey from chair to drinks cabinet. I didn't believe his drinking either. He did not drink like a man who needs the "click" in his head it gives him and the peace that follows it. Indeed, had Fraser been any more "peaceful" he would have been catatonic. This Brick didn't drink because he needed to, he drank because it was in the stage directions. And Frances O'Connor's genuinely feline Maggie is the kind of woman that would drive anyone to drink. I myself craved a large Scotch, after just one act of her beautiful, relentless, passive--aggressive, dodgily accented, monologue. Anthony Page incorporates Williams's softened Broadway version of act three, giving the play - and Maggie - light at the end of their tunnel. This is unconvincing in Tennessee Williams. It is undoubtedly an oncoming train.

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, 23rd September 2001 - John Gross
The revival of Tennessee Williams's Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, at the Lyric Theatre, starts slowly. Brick (Brendan Fraser), the handsome ex-football star turned sports commentator, is laid up in his father's Mississippi mansion: he has temporarily crippled himself after a drunken nocturnal stunt. And he is maimed in other respects, too.
He has been hitting the bottle ever since the death of his best friend; in spite of her ripe attractions, and her efforts to win him back, he no longer sleeps with his wife Maggie (Frances O'Connor). A dramatic enough situation - yet it fails to grip as it should. As Brick and Maggie hammer away, it even begins to pall.
Part of the trouble lies in the acting, which is perfectly competent but can't quite disguise the fact that it is acting. But there is a failure to achieve full impact in the writing, too. Even though Brick is the nearest thing the play has to a hero, and Maggie is the "cat" of the title, you feel that Williams hasn't felt his way deeply enough into their characters and their plight.
Everything changes once Brick's father, Big Daddy, makes his appearance. He is a tremendous character, the true imaginative centre of the play - an utterly convincing amalgam of appetite, anger, shrewdness, abrasive humour and the will to power. He is a self-made man, and as played by Ned Beatty at the Lyric he is no less "big" for being quite a small man, too. Whatever his faults, he surges with life: it makes his spasms of pain and his approaching death from cancer seem all the more devastating.
Beatty gives a terrific performance, and he energises those around him. Brendan Fraser is far more effective in his extended confrontation with Big Daddy than he is in his earlier scenes. But then part of the old man's magic, in the play's scheme of things, is that Brick is the one person he really loves - and Brick in turn commands the author's sympathy because, however much he denies it, he has strong homosexual inclinations.
Gemma Jones is admirable (when is she not?) as faded, downtrodden Big Mamma, an almost Dickensian figure with her unbecoming party frock and her ungainly walk. "Dickensian" wouldn't be a bad word for Brick's brother Gooper and his wife Mae, either, as they flatter Big Daddy and try to manoeuvre him into leaving them the estate.
Clive Carter and Abigail McKern bring out the couple's meanness with an enjoy able relish (so awful you can't help feeling a bit sorry for them, too). The small children they parade for Grandpa's benefit are deliciously obnoxious.
And when Mae and Maggie finally go for one another, Frances O'Connor comes into her own. As with Brick, so with Maggie: O'Connor makes her seen a much more interesting and fully realised character by the end.
The director, Anthony Page, has opted for the softer ending which the original director, Elia Kazan, insisted on when the play was first shown on Broadway, rather than the more openly painful alternative that Williams preferred. This is a pity; but, like the sluggish start, it does only limited damage to a production which is, for the most part, powerful and absorbing.

FINANCIAL TIMES, 24th September 2001 - lan Shuttleworth
The London stage is growing accustomed to being trodden by international movie stars these days, but even so, Bill Kenwright's production of Tennessee Williams' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof at the Lyric Theatre boasts an impressive clutch of names: Brendan Fraser as Brick, the former college football player who has turned to drink to escape the "mendacity" he sees around him, not least in his own marriage; Frances O'Connor, currently to be seen in Steven Spielberg's AI, as Brick's wife Maggie, tormented on the one hand by Brick's refusal (or inability) to sleep with her and on the other by family politicking; and the venerable Ned Beatty as Big Daddy, the Deep South patriarch whose succession is being contested before he even knows he is dying.
It could have been a production in which these actors draw applause simply for being here; under Anthony Page's direction, it is considerably more. Beatty's Big Daddy is neither as physically imposing nor as boomingly tyrannical as many, but nevertheless exudes an air of incontestable power; this is, in turn, revealed during his excellent second-act duologue with Brick to be simply Big Daddy's way of coping with the world - he works from the outside in.
English-born, Australian--raised O'Connor skilfully avoids the twin traps of making Maggie's behaviour towards Brick either hectoring or begging: she just keeps talking, and although sometimes unfortunate remarks slip out, this is by and large her way of concealing rather than indulging her pain.
For me, Fraser is the biggest and most pleasant surprise. His screen appearances have seemed to me efficient but hardly extra-ordinary. On stage as Brick, his approach is revealed to be one of precise economy and superfine judgment. He combines some beautifully graded drunk-acting with an understated rendering of Brick's detachment from the goings-on around him; indeed, it is only during Brick's one or two emotional explosions that Fraser may momentarily lose his footing - no pun intended: he also makes thoughtful, unobtrusive use of the broken-ankled Brick's crutch. The stars are matched by Gemma Jones's Big Mama, a woman who strives to match her husband's effortless force of personality, but is more used to ineffectual bustle and vacillation, a supplicant to Big Daddy in exactly the way O'Connor's Maggie (who sees herself as the cat of the title) isn't to Brick.
A trio of winsome, and indeed wincesome, children, deliberately evoke quite the same response in the audience as in Maggie: we could quite happily wring their necks if only they had any.
Page's production captures both the allure of the easy lie and the discomfort it brings - which, in turn, serves to balance the unease of the truth.

MAIL on SUNDAY - 23rd September 2001 - James Christopher
Three Hollywood stars have joined a British cast to create a smouldering piece of Southern magic in London's West End. Brendan Fraser, hunky hero of The Mummy, takes on Frances O'Connor (A. I.) and Ned Beatty (veteran of a thousand gumshoe thrillers) in the searing family drama Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.
Written by Tennessee Williams in 1955, the play shows how a wealthy plantation family is ripped apart by greed and lies.
Ned Beatty's Big Daddy is dying of cancer, but no one has the guts to tell him the truth. He rules the roost with an ego the size of his huge stomach. His two sons, Brick and Gooper, stand to inherit his.$10 million fortune and '28,000 acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile'.
The brothers could hardly hate each other more. Brendan Fraser's ex-football player, Brick, has been staggering to the drinks cabinet on crutches since his best friend Skipper commit-ted suicide. Gooper's only interest is sinking his teeth into Big Daddy's fortune. Their wives spit and snipe, as Big Daddy puts it, like 'cats on a hot tin roof'. It's one of the most entertaining domestic dramas in the American repertoire, yet you wonder in the first act if it will ever catch fire.
Brick gulps down bourbon and looks as animated as a blank sheet of paper. Detached? The man is unplugged.
Desperate to extract some sort of attention from Brick, Frances O'Connor's Maggie pouts and squeezes her breasts. To no avail. For a redneck heterosexual, Brick is suspiciously unimpressed. Desperate for sex, Maggie pads restlessly around heir steamy bedroom like an animal on heat. Her towering speeches drip frustration and bile. She curses the family leeches and sticks the knife into a list of social climbers.. Yet Maggie stops short of rubbishing her alcoholic husband. Her world revolves around Brick, even if his revolves uselessly around the memory of his best friend.
One fears for a performance of any sort from Fraser until he rumbles to life in a magnificent second act. Cornered by gnarled and grizzly Big Daddy, Fraser opens up like a can of worms. That plastic face crumples into bellows of rage, then hiccups of pain as his father pushes him towards revealing his 'disgusting' truth.
You can see why this was Tennessee Williams's favourite play. Mendacity and self-deception are powerful themes in his best work and this is as pungent as it gets. The 1958 film is difficult to top, but those with fond memories of Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor as Brick and Maggie are in for a shock. Anthony Page's sizzling stage version reveals a dimension of rawness and cruelty that went missing under the film censor's eager snips, as well as a wonderfully rude sense of humour.
Maggie has the best of it. She lays into Clive Carter's slimy Gooper and his ghastly wife Mae (superbly played by Abigail McKern) with deeply pleasing savagery. Moreover, she is a survivor. Gemma Jones provides sterling support as Big Mama. Her dress reveals too much cleavage, and her booming voice fails to disguise a lifetime playing second fiddle to a husband who despises her.
But she is by no means the weakest link in this gothic power struggle. This is great family melodrama, with a classic selection of skeletons to boot.

THE TIMES, Thursday September 20th 2001 - Benedict Nightingale
In his memoirs Tennessee Williams admitted that, of all the plays that he had written, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof was his favourite, the one "that comes closest to being a work of art and a work of craft'. He added that in the second act he had "reached beyond myself", giving a crude eloquence of expression to the cancer-ridden Mississippi plantation owner he calls Big Daddy "that I have managed to give to no other character of my creation".
Myself, I've long rated A Streetcar Named Desire higher; but after seeing Anthony Page's West End revival of Cat, at the Lyric, I feel half-inclined to defer to Williams, especially about the third act. With Ned Beatty bringing more subtlety and greater seriousness to Big Daddy than Burl Ives did in the movie, and Brendan Fraser's Brick trying and failing to ignore his father's cruel confessions and oddly touching reproaches, the whole episode is as tense and gripping as anything in London.
Brick's wife Maggie is the self-confessed "cat on a hot tin roof'. That's to say, she's trying to keep her wits and her balance in a situation that's as precarious as it's painful. Her husband has been dizzy with guilt and sexual self--doubt ever since his closest friend acknowledged he was gay and drank himself into a heart attack. He too has hit the bottle, and won't sleep with her. Mean-while, her brother-in-law and his brood-mare wife are using Maggie's childlessness and Brick's sottishness to ensure that, when Big Daddy dies, the estate will go to them.
The main objection to the play is, I suppose, that the avarice and envy of these two are over-obvious. When Clive Carter's Gooper and Abigail McKern's Mae are mocking the one-time athlete Brick as the star of "the punch bow", not the Rose Bowl, they cannot quite prevent the play passing the frontier that separates character from caricature. Yet Williams still succeeds in evoking a slice of the South seared by greed and (a word that is much used in the play) "mendacity".
Lies are everywhere: in Gooper and Mae's gruesome flattery of Big Daddy, in everyone's pretence that the old man has a spastic colon and not terminal cancer, in Brick's failure to acknowledge the full truth about his nature.
Yet there are sparks of light and life in what is at times a pretty dark, deathly play, and most of them come from Maggie. She can fib, manipulate and manoeuvre with the worst of them, yet Frances O'Connor, who takes the role here, wins your sympathy without falsifying anything more important than a southern accent.
Unlike Elizabeth Taylor in the film, who so emphasised Maggie's sensuality you thought she might burst through her bodice like an over-ripe grape through its skin, O'Connor is a sensitive, intelligent, sexually vibrant and emotionally tough young wife struggling pretty valiantly to re-store her marriage to a man she loves - and only occasionally cracking under the strain.
F1rasers Brick is a big, defeated hunk, so near nihilism that he can tell his father of his alcoholism as off-handedly as someone remarking on the weather to a stranger on a bus, yet also touchy, angry and, by the end of Act II, even distraught somewhere beneath the abstracted smiles.
That the long scene with his father is all that Williams's stage directions demand - "a cloudy. flickering, evanescent, fiercely charged interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis" - is due to both actors' measured intensity. But I must admit to being especially taken with Beatty's Big Daddy: not a smouldering Patriarch from Genesis, perhaps, but the former overseer who parlayed his way to wealth and power - and is now a contradictory mix of shrewdness, human understanding. callousness to-wards his doting wife, earnest care for his maddening son, and gut-wrenching, mind-twisting physical pain.
Altogether, there are some fine performances to be found inside Maria Bjornson's majestic set, with its high white struts, its columns and its Spanish moss. All I'd wish is that Page had given us Williams's original third act instead of the revised version that a nervous Elia Kazan coaxed from the unwilling dramatist for his Broadway production in 1955. It's surely better to hear Big Daddy roaring in rage and agony offstage as he at last feels the reality of his cancer than to see him appear to tell an abstruse joke about a randy elephant.
Worse, the rewritten ending smacks of a sentimentality entirely alien to the always incisive Williams. But can I protest very loudly when so much is so good at the Lyric? Not really.

Crowdsurfer.com Crowdsurfer.com website
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof 19th Sep 2001
Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London.
RATING: 8 out of 10
VERDICT: A stellar cast shines in Tennessee Williams' masterpiece.
Written by Tennesse Williams. Directed by Anthony Page. Starring Brendan Fraser, Frances O�Connor, Ned Beatty, Gemma Jones.
Tennessee Williams� gleefully entertaining portrait of a 1950s American family being torn apart by lies, lust, greed and envy hardly needs an introduction. Set on a hot summer night in the Mississippi Delta home of rich cotton-planter Big Daddy, "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof" plays out in real-time as the family gathers to celebrate Big Daddy�s 65th birthday. Acknowledged as one of Williams� masterpieces, this new West End production is further enhanced by a stellar cast lifted from Hollywood�s hot list.
Brendan Fraser plays Brick, Big Daddy�s alcoholic son, former sports hero and reluctant husband of Maggie, the Cat of the title. Brick is wracked with guilt over the suicide of his best friend, Skipper, and anguished by suspicions (from all quarters) of homosexuality. Somehow, Fraser manages to shake off his considerable movie role baggage, retaining just enough of it to bring sufficient humour to the role without turning the whole thing into a complete farce. It�s a commendably measured performance by an actor who, despite having played many fine dramatic roles on screen, is unfairly most often remembered for his comic turns.
The limelight, however, belongs to Frances O�Connor who, in the title role, essentially carries the production with a shining and mesmerising performance reminiscent of the late Natalie Wood. O�Connor�s Maggie is sexy, sassy and witty in a beautifully written and equally well acted role. If the play has a weak spot, it is rooted in the second act, during most of which the brilliant O�Connor is noticeably absent. Almost making up for her temporary absence, though, is the presence of Ned Beatty as the egotistical patriarch. Act Two is essentially a two-hander between Fraser and Beatty, the latter giving a seemingly effortless performance, ably displaying his talents as one of the greatest character actors of his generation. (And, yes, fans of "Deliverance" will be pleased to know, he even gets the chance to squeal like a pig!)
Purists may be somewhat disappointed by director Anthony Page�s decision to incorporate elements from both versions of Act Three, but for most people that will be a moot point. As it stands, "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof" looks like being the West End�s hottest ticket of the season.
("Cat On A Hot Tin Roof" is now booking to 22nd December.)

20th September 2001 - What's on Stage Review whatsonstage.com website (excellent resource!)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Venue: Lyric
Where: West End
Tickets: Book on-line
It's raining cats aplenty and the steam's rising off a couple of dogs too at the Lyric where the long-anticipated revival of Tennessee Williams' 1955 play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, brings proof positive of at least two oft-repeated maxims: classics are timeless and some things are worth waiting for.
This Bill Kenwright production has been the focus of stage tittle-tattle for the past year, with some dismissing as gimmicky the casting of Hollywood stars Brendan Fraser and Frances O'Connor along with Ned Beatty. But while Kenwright may well have had the appeal to North American tourists in mind (unaware, of course, of the post foot-and-mouth terrorist attacks that have cut off their supply yet further), substance has not been sacrificed in any way. This is an all-star cast that exceeds expectations in a piece that, under Anthony Page's direction, seems fresher and more poignant than ever.
At a Mississippi plantation house (rendered by Maria Bjornson's set of towering slatted walls and slow-moving ceiling fans), Big Daddy's family has gathered to celebrate his 65th birthday, in the knowledge - hidden from him - that, thanks to cancer, it will be his last. Elder son Gooper (Clive Carter) and his fecund wife Mae have designs on the family estate, while father's favourite Brick focuses his attention on the bottle and away from his childless, sexually frustrated spouse Maggie. A former football star nursing a broken ankle, Brick laments the passing of his youth and attempts to drown his sorrow and guilt following the death of his best friend, whom all believe loved him as rather more than a buddy.
While initially Fraser's Brick exhibits a tad too much detachment and too little menace, he comes into his own as his composure disintegrates with drunkenness. For his part, Beatty's Big Daddy is achingly well judged. Believing he's been given the medical all-clear, his gruff redneck-made-good is desperate to grab hold of life and mystified by his son's determination to throw it away. They appear to be opposites, but Big Daddy and Brick share an intolerance for lies and a disdain for their respective wives whose love they doubt - a suspicion which turns out to disguise the biggest lie of all.
And then there are those catty women. As Maggie - the primary cat determined to cling on to that scorching tin roof till the bitter end - O'Connor dazzles. She's clearly besotted with her husband, and yet flits, with outrageous garrulousness, between defending and attacking him. There are sterling performances, too, from O'Connor's fellow ferocious felines: Gemma Jones as Big Mama and Abigail Kern as the screeching Mae who uses motherhood as a fearsome weapon.
Though three hours long, this Cat on a Hot Tin Roof streaks by in a flash of fur and, after travelling through grief and bitterness and melancholy, it arrives finally at a most welcome moment of hope.
- reviewed by Terri Paddock

Sunday Times, Sunday 23rd September 2001 Sunday Times website
Stealing the limelight
Magnificent: Fraser and Beatty
You always wonder if they can crack it, the film stars, the Big Names, the Great Bankables. They are a mixed blessing. A new breed of theatre-goers has grown up: what opera-goers call canary-fanciers. They flock to anything to see a Great Bankable, and they will never know that what they have seen is not really theatre, sometimes not even acting. Meanwhile, the stars look down and rake it in.
Here comes the real thing. Anthony Page's production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Lyric) is one of the most thrilling and distinguished accounts of a modern classic the West End has seen in years. It is hard as steel and hot as lava. The politics of the soul, which is how Arthur Miller defined the driving force of Tennessee Williams's plays, has seldom been dramatised with such controlled, compulsive, compelling force. At the heart of the production, there are tremendous performances by Brendan Fraser and Frances O'Connor.
Maria Bj�rnson's interior has a cunning ambiguity. The slatted white walls could also be prison bars: this is a place of claustrophobia, but it is also transparent, an eavesdropper's paradise. This is a play of secrets and lies and self-delusion. The difference between Big Daddy and his family is that he knows who he is and who they are; they pretend, play-act, perform ritual dances of loyalty. The exception is Maggie, the wife of Big Daddy's younger son, Brick, and the reason Big Daddy likes her is that they are two of a kind. He acquired his immense wealth by greed and hard work; and he can see that she has the same greedy tenacity, that of the poor girl who struck rich and will not let go.
Williams was getting rather too fond of Maggie as he wrote the play (always a danger for playwrights), but Page and O'Connor brilliantly redress the balance. This Maggie is fine-boned, delicate, intense, tortured, but she is also cool, hard, determined, feline. O'Connor knows that cats are predators, like tigers. Her need for Brick is sexual, but she also wants the pleasure of possession: to have him, to have his child, and to have Big Daddy's vast estate, which she knows they can inherit if they put their minds to it together. Maggie never lies to herself. Brick does. He never allowed himself to know that his intense friendship with Skipper might have had a sexual undercurrent, and it is the dawning recognition that it did that has driven him to drink and sexual abstinence.
Fraser plays him as a big, beautiful, wounded boy-man. He makes his mouth look slightly flabby, which gives him a look of petulance, vulnerability and pain, but also hard weariness and indifference. His eyes look glassy, but you can see that he does not miss a thing. The play does not have an agenda. Brick rejects Maggie not because he is gay, or thinks he is, nor because she once slept with Skipper, but because she has finally understood him, his prolonged adolescence, his impersonal lovemaking, his emotional dependence, and above all his lies to himself. This is a performance of deep sensitivity and huge authority. Fraser and O'Connor may be up among the Bankables, but they are also first-rate stage actors: they have the stage actor's drive and follow-through and constant awareness of others.
The production is cast to the hilt. Ned Beatty is a magnificent Big Daddy: a wounded bull with the spirit of a fox who embodies all the unashamed predatory grandeur of post-war American capitalism. Gemma Jones is Big Mama, almost unrecognisable as the shrill, bovine matriarch of hysterical respectability. Clive Carter is Brick's elder brother, Gooper, mean-mouthed and devious, and Abigail McKern is his obnoxiously self-righteous wife. This is a magnificent production: the queues should stretch to Hyde Park.

INDEPENDENT on SUNDAY, Sunday 23rd September 2001 - Kate Bassett
This has been a week of near- incessant incest. Countrywide, theatre directors seemed obsessed with family congresses of the messed-up Freudian variety and other sexual taboos. In the West End's high calibre revival of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - at the Lyric - everything appears lovely at first glance. It's the 1950s and, in a Mississippi mansion, Frances O'Connor's Maggie slips in and out of pretty party frocks. Her husband Brick (Brendan Fraser, recently seen in The Mummy Returns) reclines on a lounger by airy French windows.
Yet all is not hunky-dory. The bedroom walls - with strips missing - suggest a cage and Brick's marriage is blighted by festering aggression. Fraser stares morosely into space while O'Connor proves neurotically vain and catty. She declares Brick's pa, Big Daddy, eyes her lecherously and insinuates that Brick and his late buddy were closet gays. He won't sleep with her and is slugging back the bourbon. Maggie and her sister-in-law, Mae, are also clawing over Big Daddy's wealth as he has inoperable cancer. When they say, "The whole system's poisoned", they ain't kidding.
What's remarkable, however, is how satirically funny this domestic scene can be. Mae's chubby brats form a hilariously ghastly chorus line, singing for grandpop's birthday. Meanwhile Ned Beatty's Big Daddy, resembling a dilapidated hog, is a seriously brutish and occasionally tender patriarch. Also superb, Gemma Jones's waddling Big Mama is invasive but homely and pitifully shaky under attack.
Williams's heated dialogues can seem long-winded but this is a rich drama about addiction, greed and destruction. Though Anthony Page's cast never get really ugly in their dealings, Fraser and O'Connor have flashpoints of screaming hatred. Mighty fine if not totally electrifying.

The Observer, Sunday September 23, 2001 Observer website
Susannah Clapp
Most of the time a critic wants less rather than more in the theatre: fewer gestures, much less roaring, designs that facilitate the action rather than display their own artiness. But there are times when clarity, and patient care are all wrong, and when what's needed is something wilder and more outrageous. Anthony Page's production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is too sensible.
Tennessee Williams's plays operate on a knife edge between the magnificent and the ridiculous, with memorable phrases (what other twentieth-century playwright has produced a phrase so commonly used as 'the kindness of strangers'?) swimming against a tide of floridity. It's precarious stuff: you need to see the fantasy, the desperation and the appetite all together.
Big Daddy's got cancer but doesn't know it. One smooth-talking son is on the make; another, an ambiguously heterosexual truth-teller, drinks - to drown his disgust, so he says. His daughter-in-law - the cat of the title - seethes with unrequited lust. Or maybe she's putting it on. This is Dallas with some exquisite sentences and no big hair.
You can just about see the cat in Frances O'Connor's restrained and graceful rendering of the title role, though she relies too much on tucking her hair behind her ear to show she's on edge, and too much on an unfocused gaze towards her mirror (the audience) to indicate that her identity is on the fluid side.
But where's the heat? The star-turns are able. Brendan Fraser (star of The Mummy) is stunned to the point of coma as the lush; Ned Beatty bristles efficiently as the patriarch; Abigail McKern is as beady as a magpie. But the pace is too stately really to simmer and unsettle. Maria Bjornson, who has created some vertiginous effects, has come up with a tepid eau-de-nil design, which hints only gently at something out of control beyond the windows.

The Independent, 20 September 2001 Independent website
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Lyric Theatre, London
The claws are still sharp
Paul Taylor
World-famous as the square-jawed action hero of The Mummy, Brendan Fraser now makes his West End debut as the square-jawed passive hero who has to face up to Big Daddy in Anthony Page's powerful revival of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Fraser is well cast as Brick, the son of a Southern millionaire and former college football star, who has subsided into alcohol and marital impotence after the death of a fellow-athlete with whom he seems to have had the kind of passionately pure friendship that may embrace sublimated homosexual desire.
The production reunites Fraser with the Australian actress, Frances O'Connor, who played the beautiful, unattainable object of his affections in the movie Bedazzled. Now the positions are reversed. It's O'Connor who has to do the running here, in the role of the wife, Maggie, (the cat of the title) as she battles to rekindle her marriage and to end the childlessness that makes Brick, who is his father's favourite, a less-than-convincing heir to the estate.
Pent-up and wiry, O'Connor delivers a terrific performance of charged frustration, barbed wit, and tenacity as this determined spouse. She lets you see a woman who has clawed her way up from poverty, and who is willing to use the enemy's own weapons, rather than be toppled from that hot roof of privilege. In the first act, she hurls herself against the wall of aloof indifference set up by Brick � although, at this stage of the game, Fraser's crippled, tippling jock comes across as merely bland, when he should be exuding the infuriatingly detached "charm of the defeated" and hinting at the pain that drink cannot deaden.
The actor improves considerably in his showdown with Big Daddy, here played by Ned Beatty, who offers a vivid study in unregenerated redneck vitality and bravado in the face of death. Forced by this patriarch to face up to the real reason he has become a lush, Fraser's floundering Brick resorts to the vehemence of a vicious gay-basher and to a parodic queeniness. This display of desperate denial is genuinely disturbing: it hammers home the paradox that Brick's sozzled withdrawal from corrupt society is less a matter of principle than a frightened flight from his own rigid values.
Played on a handsome set whose gap-striated wooden walls extend the idea that in this mansion privacy is at a premium, Page's production brings the grotesque birthday celebrations for Big Daddy to grisly comic life. The women are especially good. Decked out like a Christmas tree, Gemma Jones's excellent Big Mama is a bustling bundle of gaudy, interfering coarseness, while Abigail McKern's archly sycophantic Mae (the ever-breeding, acquisitive sister-in-law) thrusts forward her sixth pregnancy bump like a trophy.
This revival uses the final act, which Williams revised for the premiere, in which Brick admiringly colludes with Maggie's inheritance-securing lie that she is with child by him. But lest we feel that, along with opting for Life, the hero thereby engages in an implausibly abrupt and cynical sell-out, this version includes, from an earlier draft, Brick's ironic and ambiguous final comment on Maggie's protestations of love: "Wouldn't it be funny if that was true?". Through such details, this Cat retains unblunted claws.
Booking to 22 Dec (020-7494 5045)

Daily Telegraph, Thursday 20 September 2001 Telegraph website
A slow-burning but steamy affair
Passions and poetry of the human heart
Charles Spencer reviews Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Lyric
THOUGH Tennessee Williams described Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) as his favourite among all his plays it is produced surprisingly rarely. This fine new production by Anthony Page, starring a trio of Hollywood stars in the leading roles, is the first time I have ever seen it performed on stage and there were moments when it knocked me completely for six. It is a mighty piece, passionate, tragic, angry, frank, deeply personal and utterly compelling. At his worst Tennessee Williams can seem shrill and hysterical. At his best, as here, he has a reckless openness of heart that makes most other post-war dramatists seem like pygmies or prigs.
The action is set in Big Daddy's home on a 28,000-acre plantation in the Mississippi Delta.This immensely rich man has terminal cancer, but the cruel twist is that neither he nor his wife have been told the truth. Indeed they are celebrating his 65th birthday in the fond belief that he has nothing more than a spastic colon.
His older son, his obnoxious wife and their brood of brats have come home to make sure they are left the estate.
His younger son, Brick, is so consumed by alcohol and guilt over his betrayal of the friend who loved him, and his denial of his own homosexuality, that he could hardly care less. Meanwhile, Brick's fiery, sensual wife, Maggie, who still loves him deeply, is desperately trying to persuade him to sleep with her again.
Brick (Brendan Fraser, who scored such a big hit in The Mummy) seems almost totally vacant as he knocks back drink after drink, while Frances O'Connor's attempt to play a deeply sexed woman at the end of her tether doesn't quite ring true.
Even when she's striking provocative poses and massaging her breasts in a doomed attempt to rouse her husband's alcohol-drowned libido, there is something far too demure about her.
The play really hits home in the great second act. Big Daddy, wonderfully well played by Ned Beatty with his battered, pouchy face and a voice like a cement mixer filled with gravel, abuses most of the family he despises with reckless wrath.He then tries to drag the truth out of Brick, the only person he really cares about it.
The dialogue is thrillingly well played by Fraser and Beatty, and it is impossible not to feel that this is the conversation that Williams wished he'd been able to have with his own uncommunicative father. Like Brick, Williams always felt guilty about his sexuality, and the moment when Fraser, tottering round the stage on a crutch and desperately trying to drown the truth with drink, finally breaks down in tears and admits just what he is, and what he has done to his friend, sends shivers down the spine.
Beatty is better still. Superficially, Big Daddy is a bullying monster, but his brush with mortality has taught him what matters in life, and this growling old redneck's compassion for, and understanding of his son is deeply affecting. And then Williams turns the ratchet still further when Brick drunkenly blurts out the news that his father really is dying after all.
The third act - and Page has used the gentler, more hopeful version that the show's original Broadway director Elia Kazan insisted on - can't quite match this, though the mixture of desperate hope and unconditional love that Maggie reveals for her husband cuts like a knife.
There are many neater, cleverer and slicker dramatists than Williams, but few who plumb the human heart so deeply.
Tickets: 020 7494 5045

The Guardian, Thursday September 20, 2001 Guardian website
The gothic laughter of Tennessee Williams
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Lyric Shaftesbury, London
Rating ****
Michael Billington
Which is better? The consoling lie or the unpalatable truth? This is the enduring theme of American drama from O'Neill onwards, and it's certainly what animates Tennessee Williams's once-banned, emotional pile-driver of a play now getting one of its rare but welcome London revivals.
Seeing it again, I'm struck by how close Williams skates to melodrama. What is at stake here is Big Daddy's Mississippi Delta inheritance, which consists of "28,000 acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile". He desperately wants the land to pass to his son, Brick, an alcoholic ex-football player plagued by self-disgust. In the first act we see Brick taunted and provoked by his sexually desperate, childless wife, Maggie. And in the second, even more powerful act we see Brick forced to confront his sexual ambivalence, while Big Daddy comes face to face with his own impending death.
If I invoke melodrama it's because Brick is obviously a damaged idealist, while Gooper, his fraternal rival for the estate, is a grasping lawyer. This is good guys versus bad guys. The qualities that lift the play into another sphere are Williams's gift for gothic comedy and the supple, sinuous nature of his prose. Williams was always a humourist, and Maggie's sexual rage is made all the sharper by her detestation of her sister-in-law's children, whom she accurately categorises as "no-neck monsters". And his language, even if it sometimes strives for poetry, has a deadly accuracy - as when Maggie tells Brick that "We're not living together, we're occupying the same cage."
Anthony Page's new production does not efface memories of Howard Davies's at the National in 1988, but it gets across Williams's barbed comedy and emotional fervour, and it has the advantage of three American actors in the lead roles. Frances O'Connor's Maggie the cat has exactly the right feline sexiness, lust for territory and frantic restlessness. Brendan Fraser, in the more difficult role of Brick, strongly suggests a man whose senses are dulled by his prodigious alcohol intake but who has an acute sense of the corruption and mendacity that surrounds him.
Ned Beatty may not be as earth-larding as some Big Daddies, but he gives us all the character's chauvinist coarseness, savage humour and apprehension of death. And more than holding her own against her American colleagues, Gemma Jones memorably turns Big Mamma into a frightened and pathetic vulgarian who shows a bit too much bosom and totters around like an ambulatory rose garden. This is a production that captures well the passion and power of the state of Tennessee.
� Booking until December 22. Box office: 020-7494 5045.

EXPRESS - 19th September 2001 - Robert Gore-Langton
WITH our thoughts very much focused across the Atlantic, it is good to know that Tennessee William's American classic is as powerful as ever.
It comes too with a glamour cast in the form of Brendan Fraser - star of The Mummy Returns -and, as Maggie the eponymous cat, the fabulous Frances O'Connor, who opens this week in Spielberg's film A.I.
These Southern aristos are the right bunch. We meet them cringing under the whip of Ned Beatty as patriarch Big Daddy (all the characters sound like rap artists), while his gay footballer son Brick (Fraser) retreats inside a whisky bottle for solace. It seems as if his friendship with a dead buddy had more to it than met the eye. To make matters worse his friend had a fling with his wife, Maggie. She prowls the bedroom desperate for the sort of loving Brick isn't man enough to give her.
Brick was played by Paul Newman in the film version, but Fraser makes the part his own as he sluices his liver and hobbles about on a crutch looking tragic. He has the look and the right sense of defeatism to suggest a guy who has given up.
By contrast O'Connor sprays the furniture with her sexual hunger - a sensational performance.
Add to this carry-on the bosomy flutterings of Big Mama - a wildly implausible Gemma Jones - and you've got a feisty cocktail.
My one complaint: no family worth 10 million dollars would live on a set this wobbly.

Evening Standard, Wednesday 19th September 2001 Evening Standard website
Tennessee stands test of time
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
Dir: Anthony Page. Brendan Fraser, Frances O'Connor, Ned Beatty, Gemma Jones, Abigail McKern, Clive Carter
by Nicholas de Jongh
WHAT a serious pleasure it is to escape from the troubles of the real world to Tennessee Williams and his enthralling portrait of a 1950s American family in the Mississippi Delta, who face up to life by clinging to lies and illusions.
Williams's characters, with their view of wealth-creation as the only worthwhile pursuit, have scarcely dated. And Anthony Page's meticulous production, although occasionally a little soft- edged and sentimental, guides this Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to an astonishingly powerful crisis, when one man is driven to face the truth from which he's long been a determined fugitive.
The man in question, Brendan Fraser's footballing hero Brick, who drowns his sorrows and dowses his secrets in alcohol, cracks up in a shattering display of grief and self-disgust. His voice turns hoarse and rasps, his face distorts, his pose of aloof composure is lost in sobs.
The scene of this breakdown is a cotton-planter's house, where the family gathers to celebrate Big Daddy's 65th birthday, and Gemma Jones's dowdy Big Mamma in dungcoloured brown, vainly tries to spread a little happiness.
Maria Bjornson's stage design, with skewed perspectives, fragile walls formed from vertical Venetian blinds, and a haze of turquoise light drifting beyond the veranda, beautifully conveys the eerie, mysterious atmosphere that Williams required. For Cat on a Hot Tin Roof drifts a little beyond realism's bounds.
Death, the one home-truth that cannot be shown the door, haunts and harries the action. But the first significant spectacle is of a marriage heading straight for the rocks. Alcoholic Brick, with ankle in plaster, crutch in hand and heart apparently broken by the suicide of Skipper, his adored footballing mate, treats his wife Maggie with open indifference. If he's a practising heterosexual then he's put in suspiciously little practice.
Frances O'Connor's seductive Maggie, with a tendency to gabble and garble her appeals forcefully, aspires to be a procreative life-force. Big Daddy is dying of cancer. Why then should Maggie not produce a child, so Brick may wrest the estate from his brother whose wife - played with fine, simpering malice by Abigail McKern - has already produced five offspring.
But Maggie cannot do any such thing when Brick stonewalls her sexual approaches. A semi-detached Fraser, the spitting image of an athletic hunk out of condition, keeps his bored gaze so consistently averted from Maggie, that there's too little sense of his loathing.
Even taunts about Skipper leave Fraser medium-cool. Yet the second act's bruising encounter between Fraser's Brick and Ned Beatty's tremendous, compassionate Big Daddy, a gnarled old oak of a man, screws tension to breaking-point.
The security of illusions are lost. Fraser's Brick, anguished when the finger of homosexual suspicion is pointed at him, ends up almost reconciled to Maggie - since Page unwisely uses parts of Williams's inferior Broadway version of the third act. Even so this Cat remains, in terms of its theatrical appeal, real hot stuff.
Now Playing
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DAILY MAIL Wednesday 19th September 2001 - Michael Coveney
A LITTLE good news. The first West End opening since last week's tragedy is a masterpiece of the last half century of American theatre.
Tennessee Williams is the greatest poetic dramatist of the last century and Cat - a virile analysis of a dead marriage between Maggie the Cat and Brick the hunky, ruined sports star - is a high point. How we look at these plays in the aftermath of the American dream is a pending issue. Meanwhile, somewhat heroically we have current hot stars Brendan Fraser - The Mummy film star - as Brick, and Frances O'Connor - opening this week in Steven Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence - as Maggie. Also, let us salute Gemma Jones, the mother in Bridget Jones, and Ned Beatty - support star of more Holywood movies than I've had hot dinners - as the best (indeed only) Big Daddy since Eric Porter.
And that is part of the problem. Porter appeared in a magnificent National Theatre production 12 years ago.
This is a patchwork version - pointlessly incorporating the hitherto unheard third act adjustments - that pays tribute to the play without releasing its magic or power.
You come away thinking: We really want those subsidised theatres to take us through these great plays after all. No serious -director - all due respect to the chap in charge, Anthony Page - would allow Fraser to stare at the audience in the way he does here, like a wounded doe looking for sympathy.
Frances O'Connor is tremendous - agile, bright, funny, sexy and clever - while leaving the play like a hole in the night in the second act.
The great political and social panorama of the play is only briefly touched upon. We are left with domestic squabbles instead of national metaphor: At a time when we just needed the latter.
Maria Bjornson's design of slatted walls and grey corridors conveys a mansion opulence the show never really justifies. And Howard Harrison's lighting illuminates without much explanation.
One leaves with Brendan Fraser staring like a zombie into future space, no doubt dreaming of the next Hollywood movie to enclose his dumb, dumbed-down Brad Pitt potential.

The Observer, Sunday September 16, 2001 Observer website
Harriet Lane
Intelligence test
After all the secrecy, including reading her script in a locked room, Frances O'Connor opens up to Harriet Lane about A.I. - and why she was taken aback by Spielberg's final cut
The chance to play Maggie in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Lyric, on London's Shaftesbury Avenue, came at just the right time for Frances O'Connor, though one can't help wondering if her agent is equally pleased with her decision. After all, as a star of Steven Spielberg's forthcoming A.I. , one of the most hyped films of the year, possibly even the past few years, this is her moment. Which makes it even more extraordinary that, just at the point at which anyone else in the same situation would be larging it in Hollywood, she is ducking out of the millrace and heading into the comparatively calm waters of the West End.
A woman who knows her own mind, O'Connor spent the first few years after graduating from the Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts building up a strong reputation at the Melbourne Theatre Company, before coming to international attention with the indie film triumph Love And Other Catastrophes. And she saw the invitation to go back on stage as irresistible. Because of, not despite, the timing.
'I've always wanted to do something in the West End,' she says over an instant coffee in the rehearsal space in Ladbroke Grove, just around the corner from the home she shares with her boyfriend, Scottish actor-writer Gerald Lepkowski. 'You can't pass up that opportunity. And I'd also spent a whole year in America doing fairly big-budget movies, but I didn't find them as satisfying artistically. It was great to work in Hollywood but you don't really stretch yourself.'
Not that this came as a surprise. 'I guess I'd already heard all the stories. I don't want to bitch about Hollywood; it was great fun... I mean, I worked with Spielberg and that's got to be good, you know? And it was - it was fantastic. But there's something about the simplicity of being on stage: it's just you and the audience and a great text. It's scary, but it's a big challenge and I haven't had that for a long while.'
Spielberg spotted O'Connor, 30, as a disconcertingly feisty Fanny Price in Patricia Rozema's revisionist version of Mansfield Park, a film that might have been better liked if it had simply abandoned all claims to the original text. But A.I. was something else altogether. Such was the air of hype and orchestrated mystery surrounding the project, which had originally been fostered by the industriously secretive Stanley Kubrick, that O'Connor heard the key turn in the lock when she was first left alone in a room with the script.
She and the other cast members, including Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law, even had 'a gentlemen's agreement' with Spielberg not to discuss the film in public until its US release. 'It was very hush-hush. That's what Kubrick used to do and Steven wanted to keep in the tradition of that.' Not that O'Connor, Osment and Law really had a clear idea what they were working on. 'When we were doing it, we all felt a little bit in the dark. We knew where we fitted in, but we weren't really sure about what the end result would be.'
Now that A.I. has opened in the States, to some hostile reviews, O'Connor seems hungry to talk about it, curious about people's reactions. When she asks me what I made of it, I don't say that it reminded me of a prog-rock concept album, full of spectacle, overblown chords, metaphysics and endings that turn out not to be endings at all, but I do say that I was puzzled by her character, Monica. According to Spielberg's script, Monica and her husband, mourning their comatose son, adopt a new breed of super-robot, a small boy called David (Osment), who is programmed to love.
Monica, whose husband is largely absent from events, later rounds on David and abandons him in a forest, rather than return him to the factory, where he would be destroyed. Desperate, like Pinocchio, to become 'a real boy' and thus win back Monica's affection, David is left at the mercy of an ugly, futuristic society where unwanted robots are torn apart at 'flesh fairs', to the delight of the barbaric redneck audiences. In A.I. , only the robots have grace; Spielberg finally seems to have run out of patience with humanity. It is a strikingly sour film. As O'Connor says: 'It's not ET , that's for sure.'
O'Connor's performance, however, is always watchable, but Spielberg's direction does not allow her character to develop. It is impossible to warm to Monica, or understand her dilemma. As a consequence, David's much-touted ability to love is also called into question. It doesn't appear to be based on anything. It is, finally, purely mechanical - it isn't love at all.
'Ultimately, in a film you walk in and do the best job you can. You can't do anything else. For me, seeing it put together, I didn't think it was actually what I did, but I have to trust it. That's the story Steven wanted to tell,' says O'Connor, who admits she was taken aback when she saw the final edit. 'Because it's shot from David's perspective, you don't really understand why Monica's doing what she's doing.'
She suggests that this is the way that children often feel when confronted with the actions of adults and so, in the context of the film, it makes a certain kind of sense, though she personally finds it 'not satisfying'. She adds, with a little edge of regret: 'Originally, there were five scenes at the start of the film that explain why I do what I do.' I say that I really could have done with those. 'Yeah, I think so, too,' says O'Connor.
The shoot itself, though, sounds pleasurable enough. The technical team assembled by Spielberg was so accomplished that filming felt like stepping into a very luxurious car. 'He's got an amazing brain. His knowledge of cinema and the way a film will come together - it's fantastic. It's all edited in his head, I think, before he goes on set.'
What's particularly interesting about O'Connor on screen is her malleability. Despite those black eyes, that definite nose, she has the ability to transform herself for every role she takes on. Since A.I., she has played Gwendoline in Oliver Parker's The Importance of Being Earnest and a Second World War nurse opposite Nicolas Cage in John Woo's Windtalkers. The variety suits her.
'I think there are two types of actors,' she says. 'There are people like Meg Ryan, who is brilliant at what she does: she's her in everything. And then there's Frances McDormand or Julianne Moore, who can morph more from role to role. I'm much more interested in being that kind of actor. I don't want to be ultra-famous. I worked that out in my year in Hollywood. As soon as you get known on that level, it's nothing but debilitating in terms of your acting. I've seen it with people I know who are famous: they walk into a room and people are just reacting to them, ultra-excited about being in the room with them. It must get very tiring. You lose that spontaneity of people going, "Who are you?"'
Ah, it must be be so lonely, I say. 'Such a lonely life!' giggles O'Connor, playing along. 'But then if you've got 10 million in the bank... that might soften the blow a bit.' She doesn't fool me for an instant.
A.I. opens on 21 September; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is at the Lyric Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1 (020 7494 5045)

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