Gate Theatre, Dublin

So many vivid and tormented characters reach out to us from the sweltering heat of Tennessee Williams’s 1955 classic that it is hard to choose a protagonist.

Is it Maggie, the determined survivor who has clawed her way from penury but whose emotional and financial security now depends on seducing her aloof husband? Or is it Brick, always onstage, but so blunted with bourbon and tangled in his sexuality, that he seems psychologically opaque? Or does the play belong, like everything else here, to Big Daddy, the domineering and fatally ill patriarch, whose 65th birthday has drawn the sparring family to his coveted Mississippi plantation? Actually, as Williams knew, it is none of them. His play is fixated not on a single consciousness but on the “interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis”. Director Mark Brokaw’s new production for the Gate recognises the dynamics of desire and anxiety in the tragicomedy of Williams’s Southern Gothic parable, but despite strong individual performances the group never quite coalesces. We get plenty of heat, but it never catches fire.

As “Maggie the cat”, Fiona O’Shaughnessy takes the feline imperative as her character note, slinking across the stage in a figure-hugging satin slip, more dancer than verbal combatant in this sly game of supplication. Precise but unflowing, such physicality feels like overkill – just crossing her legs, O’Shaugnessy could be warming up for a can-can – and its extravagance denies Richard Flood’s controlled Brick his foil. There’s a lot of action, but little interaction.

It takes the play’s latter two acts to recover, and it is interplay that restores the balance. As a rumpled, irascible Big Daddy, Owen Roe is somehow exhausted and commanding, a narcissist whose desires – for life, wealth and sex – metastasise like the cancer within him, but who is alive to everything. Playing detective to his favourite son’s dissatisfaction, Roe’s exchanges with Flood are marvellous, unravelling Brick’s unspoken love for his dead friend, Skipper, and mapping his disgust with the world’s mendacity. “There’s nothing else to live with except mendacity, is there?” counsels Big Daddy.

Brokaw’s production is most affecting when it traces that weary accommodation, just as Francis O’Connor’s set, patterned with wilted flowers and creeping with rot, suggests illusion-free lives eaten away from inside. The exquisite character detail of Marion O’Dwyer’s overbearing Big Mama (nowhere more poignant than when slumped, berated, over an unwanted birthday cake) and Donna Dent’s “monster of fertility” Mae (with her calculations and biddable brood) are just as impressive, precipitating elements in the play’s gathering storm.

But still the show struggles. Its last stand-off marks a cynical complicity between Big Daddy and Maggie, the sacrifice of honesty for the promise of survival, but O’Shaughnessy’s aching, shalom-like gesture seems more competitive than complementary. Like Maggie, the production is consequently marked by over-determination, not ease. They bring us the Cat, but never find the room to swing it.

Until June 11th