Tennessee Williams: CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF

During the fourteen years of its existence, HKD Theatre has become known for its daring and not in the least canonical interpretations of the classics of modern drama. Most of the shows on its repertoire were set on stage by Lary Zappia, the director who in this latest project of his deals with the masterpiece of American drama, Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, premiered in the States in 1955. Through radical dramaturgical cuts Zappia has reached the essence of Williams' play, recalling its authors words quoted in Lyle Leverich’s book: "My next play will be a simple, direct, and horrible reflection of my heart. In it nothing will be artificial. I’ll tell the truth as I see it, I’ll speak about distortions and deformities the way I see them."

Today, there is some kind of common consent regarding Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: in the minds of a broader audience it is identified with the interesting Hollywood film with two great stars playing the leading roles; in the minds of theatre people, it has been interpreted in three basic ways – as a story about a frustrated woman with a surplus of ungratified sexual desires, as a story about the latent homosexuality of a distinguished gentleman, or as a story about illusion and reality between which the members of the Pollitt family live. The culture of erotomania that has been flooding our lives since the beginning of this century, forces the director to take into account at least the first two of the above mentioned traditional interpretations of the play…, but at the same the leading concept of HKD Theatre does not allow him a simplified presentation of the text. Therefore, by scraping below the surface of this literary and cinematic canon, Zappia creates a show centring upon themes far less innocent than those about the mere sexual instincts of libidinous characters, upon actions far more serious than petty lies appropriately thrown into the faces of hypocrites, actions that hardly deserve forgiveness. Thus, there emerges a show about moral freaks and monsters whose last breath of humanity disappears in the filth of base passions that emerge when the family is gathered around the deathbed of its powerful patriarch. That is how our Cat … becomes a full-blooded drama viewed without breath, an invitation for a showdown with Hollywood clichés.
Lary Zappia

Lary Zappia is right ... when in the programme booklet he states that today Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has become a theatrical commonplace and a metaphor that has "gone terribly sour". That is why Zappia, predominantly dramaturgically, approaches the play in an unusually radical manner, by cutting large parts of the script. ... Yet, such a shortening of the text destroys neither the meaning nor the atmosphere of the play. So, instead of offering a story about unfulfilled sexual drives, the production of HKD Theatre unmasks the essence of Williams’ play by speaking about a world bereft of emotions in which all that the piranhas gliding on stage worry about is – their own asses. ... The Rijeka production, with its homogeneous cast, offers an original, compact, and compressed interpretation of Williams’ play. HKD Theatre has once again reminded its audiences of its recognizable poetics: why make it complicated, when good theatre can be produced with simple means that do not result in cheap shows. Thus, almost as a rule, the repertoire of this small and "thinly" subsidised theatre, offers artistic productions of enviously high level…
Jasen Boko, Slobodna Dalmacija