Tennessee Williams

Stratford Festival Collection

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

'One of the hottest, sultriest plays ever written' Guardian 'Big Daddy' Pollitt, the richest cotton planter in the Mississippi Delta, is about to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. His two sons have returned home for the occasion: Gooper, his wife and children, Brick, an ageing football hero who has turned to drink, and his feisty wife Maggie. As the hot summer evening unfolds, the veneer of happy family life and Southern gentility gradually slips away as unpleasant truths emerge and greed, lies, jealousy and suppressed sexuality threaten to reach boiling point. Made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a masterly portrayal of family tensions and individuals trapped in prisons of their own making. 'Williams's most impassioned and articulate statement on human isolation' The New York Times Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

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A family crisis brings out the best and the worst in every member of it.

Ignorance – of mortality – is a comfort. A man don't have that comfort, he's the only living thing that conceives of death, that knows what it is. The others go without knowing, which is the way that anything living should go, go without knowing, without any knowledge of it

The human animal is a beast that dies and if he's got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting! – Which it never can be...

made me think about achilles and patroclus :''')

It was one of those beautiful, ideal things they tell about in the Greek legends, it couldn't be anything else, you being you, and that's what made it so sad, that's what made it so awful, because it was love that never could be carried through to anything satisfying or even talked about plainly.

"You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves." from 

I'm not tryin' to whitewash my behaviour, Christ, no! Brick, I'm not good. I don't know why people have to pretend to be good, nobody's good.

 know it? Nobody says, 'You're dying.' You have to fool them. They have to fool 

 Because human beings dream of life everlasting, that's the reason! But most of them want it on earth and not in heaven.

I can't see a man but you! Even with my eyes closed, I just see you!

WHY! – am I so catty? – 'Cause I'm consumed with envy an' eaten up with longing?

When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant...

Later tonight I'm going to tell you I love you an' maybe by that time you'll be drunk enough to believe me.

you have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated. – You look so cool, so cool, so enviably cool.

Living with someone you love can be lonelier – than living entirely alone! – if the one that y' love doesn't love you...

Michael Klepacki

Cat on a hot tin roof

Sophie Machray

Eliana

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Maggie the Cat fights for the lives of her damaged and drinking husband Brick, herself, and their unborn children in the revised version of Williams' acclaimed dramatization of Big Daddy's birthday and deathday party and family gathering

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

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