National Theatre Live: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a 1955 American three-act play by Tennessee Williams. The play, an adaptation of his 1952 short story "Three Players of a Summer Game", was written between 1953 and 1955. One of Williams's more famous works and his personal favorite, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955. Set in the "plantation home in the Mississippi Delta" of Big Daddy Pollitt, a wealthy cotton tycoon, the play examines the relationships among members of Big Daddy's family, primarily between his son Brick and Maggie "the Cat", Brick's wife. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof features motifs such as social mores, greed, superficiality, mendacity, decay, sexual desire, repression, and death. The dialogue throughout is often written using eye dialect (nonstandard spelling) intended to represent accents of the Southern United States. The original production starred Barbara Bel Geddes, Burl Ives, and Ben Gazzara. The play was adapted as a film of the same name in 1958, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman as Maggie and Brick, with Ives and Madeleine Sherwood recreating their stage roles. Williams made substantial excisions and alterations to the play for a revival in 1974. This has been the version used for most subsequent revivals, which have been numerous.