Tennessee Williams’s turbulent drama, with its confessional solos and painful comedy, poses a huge challenge to actors, and for her bold all-black production Debbie Allen has assembled a fine cast that includes James Earl Jones, Adrian Lester, Phylicia Rashad (once of The Cosby Show) and even in a tiny role the comedian Richard Blackwood.

On a 28,000-acre plantation in Mississippi, brash millionaire Big Daddy Pollitt is celebrating his 65th birthday. His family knows — though he does not — that he is dying of cancer. The ambitious wives of his two sons Brick and Gooper are bent on carving up his legacy.

Brick is his father’s favourite, but his mangled psyche is the wound at the heart of the play. A former sports star, he’s now pickling himself in drink and nursing a recently broken ankle. A man who’s never carried much besides a football and a highball, he is at once handsomely self-contained and crushed by the death of his best friend Skipper.

Gallery: Cat On A Hot Tin Roof afterparty

Adrian Lester endows Brick with a defeated, almost robotic quality — his alcoholism mechanical, his attempts at violence farcical.

While he occasionally lashes out angrily with a crutch, the main note of the performance is sour evasiveness. It’s a coolly understated turn.
Although Brick cares little for his wife Maggie (Sanaa Lathan), he appears shackled to her. She loyally carries him, skittering about Morgan Large’s elegant louvered set as she maps out their future. Early on she has to carry the play, too.

Its title is an image of her struggles to claw back Brick’s affection while silkily persuading him to claim his rightful share of Big Daddy’s inheritance.

Lathan suggests Maggie’s frayed yet purposeful manner, but doesn’t quite catch the character’s masochistic longing and musical charm. She’s engaging, yet fails to transfix us as Maggie really should.

Jones on the other hand brings massive gravity to his role as the bruising patriarch. Initially sounding like an old-fashioned Southern preacher afflicted with a bad cold, he nonetheless commands attention, making something baroque out of a line as simple as “Shut up” and sonorously communicating his disgust at the “powerful and obnoxious odour” of deception that wafts through his demesne.

This Big Daddy isn’t an out-and-out tyrant. He treats his wife (Rashad, regal in a fussily grandmotherly way) dismissively, but is benign in his dealings with Brick.

There’s a surprising playfulness in his little pelvic wiggles as he confirms he’s still potent — and with it an unexpected vulnerability.

Cat on a Hit Tin Roof is a strangely jagged drama, powerful in its depiction of moral crisis yet uneven and ambiguous. Debbie Allen’s direction, best in the two-handed scenes, can’t conceal this, and the updating of the setting to the 1980s makes it less plausible that Brick’s sexual confusion would cause him deep anxiety.

Still, even if the production could do with more fierceness, it packs a big emotional punch, and the face-off between Brick and Big Daddy in the second act is a triumph.
Until 10 April. Information 0844 482 5170.