O’Connell shoulders physical role in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Australian director Benedict Andrews likes to update classics. His 2012 version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Young Vic was updated to the present, and so, too, is this high definition revival of Tennessee Williams’s 1955 classic, with Sienna Miller playing the sexually neglected Maggie and rising-star Jack O’Connell as Brick, her tormented, alcoholic husband.

It’s a performance in which their bodies, both of which are exposed in this raw and explicit production, speak volumes. She’s the southern belle whose looks elevated her from poverty into one of the richest families on the Mississippi delta, while he is the former American football star haunted by the loss of a friendship that was gay in all but name. Much of this is evoked by Miller’s feather-light and slender frame, and O’Connell’s form, which is big in the biceps department.

Andrews cleverly exploits all this physical beauty. His production is saturated with the tension of a marital bedroom in which sex no longer happens. And although the action is usually set in the Mississippi mansion owned by Brick’s father Big Daddy (played here with alpha male bravura by Colm Meaney) the director keeps all the action in the couple’s unhappy room.

The occasion is Big Daddy’s 65th birthday. Family members constantly trespass into Maggie and Brick’s private misery. None are less welcome than the childless Maggie’s fecund sister-in-law Mae (Hayley Squires), an arch-manipulator of family politics whose prime objective is to promote her husband (and Brick’s less favoured brother) into the position of inheritor when Big Daddy dies.

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