Who was the cat on the hot tin roof? Elizabeth Taylor was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of the skittish Southern belle, Maggie, in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But the real cat was Tennessee Williams himself.   Williams took the title from the phrase “nervous as a cat on… read more +

This is re-posted here to tie in with next week’s column, on the forthcoming production of Rough by Grace Dyas at the Axis Ballymun. Originally published in Village, 2007. On the evening of May 21, 1957, a Garda Inspector arrived at 18a Herbert Lane, an old coach house on a laneway off Baggot St in… read more +

At the Gate Theatre, February 2009. Published in the Sunday Tribune. This play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. Tennessee Williams’s analysis, not mine. He gives those lines, more or less, to his narrator, Tom, at the beginning of ‘The Glass Menagerie’, just opened… read more +