Behind the scenes: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at West Yorkshire Playhouse

A society drowning in bourbon-coloured water, an opulent mansion and improvised jazz are not the easiest of illusions to create on stage, as Alfred Hickling discovers as part of our unique crowd-sourced theatre project

It’s the first day of the fit-up at the West Yorkshire Playhouse – the week in which the set is installed and technical rehearsals begin – and already production manager Eddie de Pledge has a sinking feeling. Not that there’s anything wrong (the build is progressing on schedule), but the design for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof requires approximately a third of the stage to be submerged in brown, bourbon-coloured water.

Before anything else can happen, several layers of industrial-grade pond-liner have to be deployed. “If a designer wants water as a scenic element, you have to add at least an extra day to the schedule,” De Pledge says. “Even 10 centimetres of liquid creates over three tonnes of additional weight. Then there’s issues of humidity in the atmosphere, especially where electrics are involved. And the water has to be changed regularly to prevent it becoming stagnant.”

De Pledge will be doing his utmost to avoid any aquatic disasters on the scale of the National theatre’s production of Alan Ayckbourn’s boating comedy Way Upstream, which notoriously flooded the Lyttelton auditorium in 1982. But there are valid artistic reasons for turning the Playhouse into a temporary swimming pool. Designer Francis O’Connor explains: “The Quarry theatre is one of the largest stages in the country – it demands that you make an epic, visual statement. At the same time, Tennessee Williams’ play is remarkably intimate – there are lots of sequences which are basically two people talking in a bedroom.” O’Connor’s solution has been to increase the rake of the stage, so that the the room itself plunges into a tide of muddy, brown water. “The play deals with death, alcoholism and a family in crisis,” O’Connor says. “The idea was to suggest a society sliding into the drink.”

Recreating the opulence of an antebellum mansion is an expensive business. There’s a budget of more than £1000 for balustrades alone (all the show’s carpentry is done in-house) and a parquet floor to be laid – albeit from painted MDF rather than solid wood. Even the chinoiserie of the decorative scheme is the outcome of a careful search to find period-correct silk wallpaper: “Though not in Mississippi,” O’Connor says. “Sadly, the research budget doesn’t stretch that far. But we found something very close at Nostell Priory, near Wakefield.”

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The director, Sarah Esdaile, did visit the Mississippi Delta, however, while on honeymoon four years ago. The trip fired her ambition to direct what many consider to be Williams’s finest work. “What this play gives you is that otherworldly sense of southern Mississippi,” she says. “It’s like no place on Earth; the flatness, the humidity, the weird alien moss hanging in the swamps. And then there’s the music of course.”

Williams’s fictitious plantation is in the region of Clarksville, often referred to as the birthplace of the blues (Elia Kazan’s original Broadway production featured an appearance by the great country-blues duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Esdaile’s production shifts the action slightly further south, to the swampland surrounding New Orleans, and takes inspiration from the sounds of that region. “We originally discussed commissioning a jazz-based score,” she says, “but then we realised that a jazz composition may be a contradiction in terms.”

Instead, the music in the production is the result of an unusual experiment in which a group of musicians from Leeds Improvised Music Association (LIMA) were invited to interact directly with the cast. As the actors rehearsed, the musicians improvised, and the results of these sessions have been edited into a montage by sound designer Mic Pool. “In an ideal world, we’d have live musicians improvising every night,” Esdaile explains. “Unfortunately we couldn’t afford that. But what we do have is a bespoke score that developed as the result of an improvised dialogue between actors and musicians.”

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Esdaile has just one further day in the rehearsal room before a gruelling week of 13-hour days begins. “It’s the most exciting and the most nerve-racking part of the process,” she says. “You have four weeks to create a theatrical illusion in the rehearsal room; and then four days to recreate it all again with lights, sound and costumes. It’s the point where you most often find yourself switching into problem-solving mode, and it can sometimes seem as if the poor play is being ignored.”

The main contribution to a successful tech is anticipating problems in advance – nowhere more so than in the wardrobe department, for which a classic costume drama such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a major operation. Deputy head of wardrobe, Victoria Marzetti, explains: “You read the script and note that it is set in 1950s Mississippi. That means lots of white linen. And lots of linen means lots of laundry.”

Her job is made more challenging by the fact that some of the actors will be required to wade ankle-deep through filthy brown water. This won’t present such a problem for cotton and light fabrics, but some of the more elaborate women’s costumes are dry-clean only. It’s not practical for theatres to work with cleaning chemicals, but Marzetti reveals that there is a secret, temporary fix for emergencies: “Vodka. A quick squirt with neat alcohol works wonders because it kills the bacteria.”

Marzetti pulls out the wardrobe department’s proudest creation for this show – the outfit worn by the matriarch Big Mama, whom Williams describes as being like “a Japanese wrestler wearing at least half a million in flashy gems”. Big Mama’s bling was made possible by the fortunate find of several metres of emerald, beaded fabric at a knock-down price. But an even greater bargain is the padded underwear – a Debenhams leotard stuffed with birdseed – to plump the actor, Amanda Boxer, to an appropriate size. “It will be very hot and very heavy” Marzetti says, “but Amanda wanted to feel the incapacitating effects of genuine weight.”

Movement director Etta Murfitt has been teaching Boxer how a much larger person gets in and out of a chair; and has spent time developing a suitably feline stance for Zoe Boyle, who plays Maggie the Cat. But there is little point in the actors looking right if they don’t sound right; and perhaps the most indispensable role has been that of voice specialist, Kara Tsiaperas, who has coached the cast in the nuances of deep south dialect.

“Williams was very specific about melodic speech patterns he wanted to hear,” Tsiaperas says. “There’s a stage direction which states that Maggie’s voice must have ‘range and music’.” Tsiaperas, a New Yorker herself, says there is nothing worse than actors falling into “generalised, American drawl. It’s a myth that everyone in the south talks slowly – it’s just that the stress falls on different vowels. But the hardest thing of all is not to sound condescending. Whenever I’m required to coach southern American accents I’m reminded of a line from the film Sweet Home Alabama: “Just because I talk slow doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”