It is never easy to stage a Tennessee Williams script. All those lines, all that domestic rage, and that southern drawl. This production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is successful at meeting these challenges and at telling this captivating story.

The play is about the Pollitts, a troubled, wealthy Southern family, meeting at their vast cotton plantation in Mississippi. They are ostensensibly there to celebrate the sixty-fifth birthday of the family’s patriarch, Big Daddy (Simon Haines), but all of the characters except for Big Daddy and his wife, Big Mama (Tamara Astor, playing to type as well as ever), know that Big Daddy is about to die from cancer. Oldest son Gooper (Oskar McCarthy) and his wife Mae (Charlotte Reid) are determined that the plantation will be passed on to them after Big Daddy’s death.

The first act focuses entirely on Big Daddy’s younger son, Brick (Ben Kavanagh), an injured former American football player, and his wife Maggie (Josephine Starte), the ‘cat’ of the play’s title. Through their intense interaction, the audience learns of their respective dissatisfactions within their marriage: Maggie’s desire for sexual intimacy and children and for her affections to be returned, and Brick’s alcoholism and grief over the death of his sexually ambiguous friend Skipper.

This first scene wasn’t quite on par with the rest of the production, with Starte throwing out a few of her lines too quickly, but it was watchable enough; perhaps this discrepancy was just down to first night nerves. Far greater tension was effectively created as the play progressed.  Haines was the most impressive at facilitating this; he was convincing as an aging redneck patriarch with diminishing health and diminishing power over his family and business. His rage over and then acceptance of his fate at the end of the play was impressively controlled. Kavanagh was also vital at creating the play’s tension, playing a wonderfully understated yet visibly at-a-loss Brick, moving believably from meek and laconic as he listens to his wife in the first act, to revelatory and tragic by the end of the production. All of the acting was of a very high standard: little fault can be found with Reid’s snide Mae, or Starte’s determined Maggie. And it’s always a risk bringing kids on stage, but the five young actors playing Mae and Gooper’s boisterous and grating children deserve praise.

Taking on of a main part, Maggie and Big Daddy in particular, means hefty monologues to deliver. That there were only a few minor slip-ups over lines in this show should be applauded. The American accents were a bit better than standard Cambridge efforts – the production’s own dialect coach (Marina Tyndall) must have been instrumental to this. Costumes were good, and the set was well throughout out, allowing the actors ample room for movement. The blocking was flawless, often visually highlighting various fault lines between different members of the family, and sparing (and therefore effective) in physical tussles alongside the characters’ verbally expressed frustrations.

The script of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof can no longer be as excitingly shocking as it was upon its debut. Bearing this in mind, this production keeps Williams’ fascinating considerations of humanity, compassion and mendacity admirably to the fore.