Theater: “The Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”: The dreaming animal dies

There are two dancing almost naked across the stage. One would almost like to think of them as Adam and Eve. Are we before or after the Fall? The question seems completely unanswerable in the ongoing gender debate. Or to use a football metaphor: after the fall is before the fall.

Elia Kazan brought Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” to the stage in New York in 1955. At that time, the spirit of the times conjured up the American way of life, for which the beautiful appearance was everything and the ugly truth behind it was nothing. And now we saw a strange couple, Brick, a depressed, drunken former sports star, and Maggie, his wife, who was energetically taking control of the couple’s public image. Something binds them together and something also separates them in an insurmountable way.

The 1958 film adaptation of the play relied entirely on Paul Newman as Brick and Elisabeth Taylor as Maggie. There was a constant crackle of sexual tension between the two of them; the big outbreak of passion always seemed imminent. And here was Maggie struggling to break through the armor of icy rejection that Brick surrounded himself with! However, Tennessee Williams felt betrayed by this reading of his play and publicly advised against going to the cinema. Because the simple truth is: Brick is gay and mourns his dead friend Skipper, and what’s more, he blames Maggie for his death. There is nothing left but cold and the eternal bottle of whiskey between them. Tolerance means what is already indifference. But the “Production Code”, the self-censorship in Hollywood, made a film about a gay ex-athlete who is depressed and addicted to alcohol completely impossible. Nevertheless, the viewer inevitably notices something when Brick idealizes his dead friend in such a way and mourns for him like his only survivor. The art of suggestion, we learned in this film, can be more effective than the unrestricted expansion of sensitivities.

Anne Lenk is now directing “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at the Deutsches Theater (DT) in Berlin. Some people reflexively asked whether this wasn’t too old a Southern story. The gay man who publicly acts as a heartthrob – think of Hollywood star Rock Hudson, who then became one of the first prominent AIDS victims in the 80s. In times of omnipresent queer topics, that seems to be yesterday’s news – and Lenk tends to push this conflict, which once seemed so scandalous, aside.

Other fights are coming up, like the one for Big Daddy’s million-dollar inheritance. He’s still alive and is just turning 65, but everyone is keeping from him the terrible diagnosis of what to him is just intestinal cramps: terminal cancer. Now what is legally called “community of gains” is coming onto the scene and is reminiscent of the capitalism of free competition: redistribution through robbery, slander and fraud.

Anne Lenk wisely focuses on this family battleground in her production. Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” began with the famous sentence: “All happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Individualization through unhappiness is where we have come a long way. A hundred years later, Undine Gruenter wrote that family is the bullet in the head that you carry with you.

The cool gesture of the evening has something of a very distant look back at the human condition. Love, loyalty, compassion, friendship – these now seem to be search terms with only a low hit rate. Right at the beginning of the evening, an image lights up in the background of the stage, like a window on the computer screen: a rotating cake (stage design: Judith Oswald). The birthday pictogram of a digital age. Then there is a long fade to black like an opening abyss. Man as a dreaming animal has long since become a calculating animal, but that too seems strangely distant. This is about the dying animal.

And so we see eight actors and actresses with a great Ulrich Matthes as Big Daddy in the center. He has had death within him for a long time and yet still seems to be the vital core of this family. A patriarch on revocation – not a self-righteous power-monger, but a highly insecure old man who clings to life, while carrying a skeptical and sometimes cynical protective shield against the world. Who should he leave something to? It would be better, it seems to him, that there would be nothing to distribute and that he would be standing there naked in his last hour. Then he would now know the truth about himself.

The scenery changes into a kind of modern dance of death. Lorena Handschin shows us a Maggie who doesn’t want to let the degenerate representatives of this family stop her. She has a tangible goal that she will accept any humiliation to achieve: securing a high standard of living. Because she comes from social exclusion and knows what lack means. Jeremy Mockridge’s Brick, on the other hand, seems to be made of cotton wool. Even the drunkard’s aggression is behind him; everything is the same to him in his disgust for life. Brick embodies total nihilism here, he doesn’t want anything more – unlike Big Daddy, he is not attached to life, feels as if he had died long ago.

What a strong collective acting performance that is reminiscent of the ensemble spirit of DT days long gone! This is also reflected in the fact that seemingly predictable supporting characters gain an unexpected presence. For example, Miriam Maertens as Big Mama, who – despite the disregard shown to her from all sides – fights for her image of an intact family, even if she inevitably becomes a ridiculous figure in the process. Her first-born son Gooper (Jonas Hien) is a successful lawyer and therefore completely uninteresting – on the other hand, Julischka Eichel gains an unexpected presence as his wife Mae. She cleverly subverts the stereotype of the notoriously fertile birthing machine that she is in the eyes of not only Maggie and Brick, but also Big Daddy. Of course, on Big Daddy’s birthday she consistently sends her five “neckless monsters” into the fight for the money that will soon be distributed to support the inheritance claim of the firstborn, but she does this with a cosmopolitan, smooth managerial charm.

So here are three women who are fighting for their future with all the means at their disposal, while the men have long since capitulated. And the five “neckless monsters”, what future do they represent? If you just take the first names of the children who play them here at DT, you can guess a lot: from Anna Amalia, Kyra Liana to Zita Theresa, they sound like future pretenders to the throne. But if everyone wants to rule, who will serve?

You don’t have to follow Anne Lenk’s feminist reading of the play, but the rhythm and intensity of the production are striking, despite – or because of – its obvious moments of pause in the action. What an irritating picture puzzle of a bestiary of the modern family, which seems to be primarily an economic association led by extremely determined women.

Next performances: December 14th, 20th and 25th www.deutschestheater.de