The new cats'meow

South Africa's new Cats cast learns the brutal beauty behind a musical defined by sweat, stamina and sheer ensemble brilliance

- Keith Bain

It's the musical most of us associate with the hit song Memory and with grown men and women prancing around the stage wearing leotards, tails and shaggy feline wigs pretending to be what the poet T.S. Eliot dubbed "Jellicle cats".

No matter your feelings about it, though, there's no denying that - for the performers - it's possibly the most demanding stage show there is.

Many who've been in it from ballerinas to athletically hardwired professional dancers have spoken about its relentless physicality. Never mind the stamina and arduous rehearsals, there's also Gillian Lynne's extremely technical and sinuous choreography, the lengthy pre-show prep of warm-ups, makeup and wigs, the literal blood, sweat and tears, the injuries that dancers invariably dance their way through, and the months-long lack of a social life thanks to extended runs, night after night, weekends and holidays too.

And then there are, understandably, the furrowed foreheads when you explain the show to anyone who hasn't seen it. No traditional plot, no major character-driven goal, and most analyses of it suggest that it's more the experience of it than a storyline that fans lap up.

In many ways its very existence defies reason.

"Jellicle cats", incidentally, is believed simply to be a contraction of the way Eliot heard very young children struggling to say "dear little cats", though others claim it's a play on the word "angelical"; whatever the poet meant by it, in 1939 he wrote a children's book of light poems about them which some 40 years later the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber decided to set to music. Thus, one of history's most successful musical theatre shows, Cats, was born, albeit not without considerable pain. A lot of people hated the idea, directors and choreographers included, and Cameron MacIntosh, Lloyd Webber's producing partner, struggled to raise money for it. Even finding a West End theatre to host it proved nightmarish.