Review: The Cat's Meow at Hampton Hill Theatre

A confident 4 STARS for Fiona Smith’s production of The Cat’s Meow by Teddington Theatre Club. The tale, based on real events, brings to life all the decadence, scandal and deceit of 1920s Hollywood.

Nothing is more alluring than the scandal, sex and glamour of wealthy celebrities. This production of The Cat’s Meow gives an entertaining insight into the secrets of 12 unimaginably wealthy elites, movie producers and eager starlets.

William Randolph Hearst, owner of newspapers across America, has a Gatsby-esque demeanour. He is extraordinarily wealthy, yet remains an enigma. Hearst owns a luxury yacht, on which he invites 11 friends including Charlie Chaplin, Marion Davies, Chaplin’s secret lover and Hearst’s public mistress, and the comical highly-inquisitive gossip columnist Louella Parsons.

Set in 1924, the yacht sets sail from Hollywood, a city repeatedly referred to as an animal, wizard and the devil in the play. Although the set is simple, Smith maintains the decadence of a luxury yacht by imaginative and creative use of space on the stage.

The first half of the show is dedicated to setting the scene. It becomes clear that everyone on the boat has a selfish motive, the most apparent of which is struggling movie producer, Thomas Ince. Ince wants Hearst to give him a generous budget to produce movies on his behalf in Hollywood. He uses his knowledge of Marion Davies’s secret affair with Chaplin to manipulate Hearst and make an ally of him.

Meanwhile Ince has his own secret love affair with Margaret Livingston. Chaplin is portrayed as a lady’s man who has accidentally got one of his 16-year-old actresses pregnant, a fact which is quickly circulated around the boat.

By the second half of the show the audience is well acquainted with the characters and their self serving reasons for attending the party. The pace of the play picks up and becomes more sinister, as deceit and betrayal is unveiled, power is used to manipulate and blackmail people into submission.

Someone is murdered on the yacht, and great measures are taken to keep the secret hidden, with only a handful of people on the boat privy to the truth. Some use this knowledge to exploit and further the interests of their career and others will use their power to make sure the truth is never revealed.

This darkly comic voyage is full of brilliant innuendo and explicit sexual propositions. Smith has used the allure and mystery of 1920s elitism to keep his audience ensnared from the start to finish of a most decadent tale.