Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Tennessee Williams)

--The blurb--
"‘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."

--The review--
In Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, the focus is on Laura, a main character with physical illness, a sensitive nature, and a fascination with small glass models. There are outcasts in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof too, but they are not the epicentre; it is equally complex, though differently, and equally haunting, though differently also.

It is not the outcasts themselves (chiefly Brick's wife Maggie and Big Daddy's wife) who form the centre of the drama, but rather the drama that is created by their interactions with other characters. Williams is a master of atmosphere and of the creation of larger-than-life characters; even weeks after reading, their personalities, right down to their accents, body language and tones of voice, stay inside the reader's head. The play is occasionally romantic and occasionally tragic, but it is laden most of all with histrionics, melodrama, and intensity, and it is this that engenders the play's complexity, as well as its lingering after-taste in the reader's mind, particularly due to the great humanity of the relationships that are depicted.

Interestingly, in some editions, two separate endings are provided for readers' perusal. One, of course, is the original ending written by Williams; the other is an ending that was co-written by a theatre director, Elia Kazan, for the play's 1955 première in New York. Without revealing too much, Williams' ending seems preferable: less predictable and obvious, more subversive, and with a stronger closing statement. The director's ending also unfortunately makes use of the most infuriating aspect of Williams' play: the repetition of the play's title throughout the dialogue, which removes any opportunity for the reader to work out the connection for themselves, as well as just sounding corny. It is a great shame, because as demonstrated in The Glass Menagerie, Williams is also a master of metaphor, and what he realises in The Glass Menagerie that he apparently does not in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is that his audiences are intelligent enough to work these metaphors out for themselves.

Other works by Tennessee Williams
The Glass Menagerie (1944)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
The Rose Tattoo (1951)
Camino Real (1953)
Suddenly, Last Summer (1958)
Sweet Bird of Youth (1959)
The Night of the Iguana (1961)
Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1962)
A House Not Meant To Stand (1982)

The Crucible (Arthur Miller)

--The blurb--
"Arthur Miller's classic parable of mass hysteria draws a chilling parallel between the Salem witch-hunt of 1692 - 'one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history' - and the McCarthyism which gripped America in the 1950s. The story of how the small community of Salem is stirred into madness by superstition, paranoia and malice, culminating in a violent climax, is a savage attack on the evils of mindless persecution and the terrifying power of false accusations."

--The review--
Nestling comfortably alongside the more conventional religions are several arguably more 'niche' and less conventional ones, such as Jedi, Hare Krishna, and Wicca. Given the increasing acceptance of the majority of religious beliefs in modern culture, it is perhaps difficult to reconcile today's tolerance with the notion that those sharing Wiccan beliefs, or something similar to them, could have been killed for it a couple of centuries ago, even if the people concerned were falsely accused.

This, however, is the gruelling reality of Arthur Miller's (arguably most famous) play, The Crucible. Founded on a complex web of lies, spin and hysteria, Miller effectively depicts the struggles and attitudes of 17th-century residents of Salem, Massachusetts, at the heart of the notorious witch trials. Creeping under the reader's skin similarly to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, it combines emotion and humanity with darkness, coldness and distance.

Miller's stage directions, however, are highly Stanislavskian, proving dense in detail and providing information on the characters' background that would normally be more suitable for a novel, and that only readers and directors of the play will ever get to know (there are no instructions for this information to be communicated to the audience during the play, Brecht-style). There is something of the omniscient narrator about it, à la the narrator of Fantasia, meaning that Miller is strongly there with us throughout our reading of the play. It is easy for a reader or director to visualise the characters, and Miller's manipulation of dialect is extremely skilful. Moreover, the narrative arc is as realistic and touching as it is chilling, and Miller's depth of research is not to be sneezed at: as well as depicting events with presumably the greatest possible accuracy, his work goes right down to using the same people who were at the centre of the scenario in 1692, including the use of their real names.

However, the historical context is extremely intricate, and in itself can potentially require deep study, which means that this text easily merits multiple readings (or viewings, if actually seeing the play is more your thing). It's easy to see how the play has known such success since its publication; Miller's writing is very vivid, with characters and scenarios just leaping off the page. Perhaps even more poignant and significant than an intrinsic reading of the play (=just considering the events of the play in themselves) is the fact that Miller wrote this play at the height of the red scare, in 1953, which brings into focus a series of political parallels that are still relevant today.

The play's complexity is perhaps the only offputting element, but this is something which should be relished by those who enjoy a challenge, and the play has clearly not lost appeal with the general public because of it. Truly intellectual crowd-pleasers are often difficult to come by, and it is perhaps this that proves Miller's most powerful legacy.

Other works by Arthur Miller (selection)
No Villain (1936)
They Too Arise (1937)
Honors at Dawn (1938)
The Man Who Had All The Luck (1940)
Focus (1945; a novel)
All My Sons (1947)
Death of a Salesman (1949)
A View from the Bridge (1955)
After The Fall (1964)
The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972)
The American Clock (1980)
Broken Glass (1994)
Resurrection Blues (2002)
Finishing the Picture (2004)