“It’s beautiful, really beautiful,” she says. “It’s a replica of the one in the film, but a different colour.” When talking about ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’, it’s hard not to reference the 1958 film that starred the sexy, smouldering Elizabeth Taylor and Paul-of-the-piercing-blue-eyes-Newman. The original stage play that first opened in 1955 was actually a lot more controversial than the film, and it’s this original version that the Queensland Theatre Company, together with Perth’s Black Swan Theatre Company, will stage at QPAC this month. “Tennessee re-wrote the script to fit a film audience and so much of it was monitored and stripped back to be more appealing, a bit safer. The play is more daring.”

Cheree plays Maggie, the cat in the title, and is enjoying being back in theatre after TV roles in ‘Packed To The Rafters’, and more recently playing Constable Debbie Webb in Channel Nine’s ‘Underbelly: The Golden Mile’, a role which earned her an AFI Nomination for ‘Best Lead Actress In A Television Drama’.

The play unfolds on a Southern plantation where the Pollitt family is gathered for patriarch Big Daddy’s (John Stanton) birthday. It examines the relationships among members of Big Daddy's family and the suspicion and lies underlying the celebrations. The play focuses mainly on Big Daddy’s grieving, alcoholic son Brick (Tom O’Sullivan) and Brick’s wife Maggie, a woman desperately trying to save her marriage. Cheree describes it as “quite a voyeuristic, fly-on-the-wall look at the depths of, and the inner workings of a family.”

Cheree has seen the film adaptation of the play twice, the last time a year ago, but says she’s very conscious of not letting it influence her own portrayal of Maggie. “I haven’t touched it again and I haven’t watched anything else of Elizabeth Taylor’s because I know there’s such an attachment to her portrayal of this role. I mean she’s such a stunning woman and she did get nominated for an Oscar and so people have that association with the play. I don’t want to go back to any pre-determined or pre-played versions of this role because it’s mine, and it’s our production and it’s exclusive to all of that. If we’re taking it from someone else’s cue then it’s not being true to what it is right here, right now.”

Tennessee Williams wrote strong female roles; arguably something there isn’t enough of in theatre and Cheree is relishing the challenge. “The interesting thing about Maggie is she’s got a lot of strength and a lot of fight in her, but she’s also soft and sensual, emotional and fragile and that’s what makes her, and this role, so beautiful. It shows so many dimensions of a woman.”

Conveying such an intense character takes a lot of work and energy as Cheree explains, “Act One is a mammoth of an act for an actress and I’m finding that incredibly challenging. Just the duration and the intensity of it require a lot of muscularity. I’m drawing on a lot of skills, a lot of tools I learnt at drama school to get me through these enormous passages. It requires literal muscularity of breath and lung capacity in order to have that control of the dialogue. If you want to get the true sense of what Tennessee intends through that sentence, you’ve got to be able to get through it… so there’s a lot to prepare for in that way as well as just the characterisation stuff.”

Cheree feels being physically in good shape will also help her give the part her all. “I’m doing dance classes, keeping fit, I’m eating really well because after opening night sometimes you just crash, so I want to be really fit and healthy as I’ve got a whole season to go.”

Although the play was first performed over fifty years ago, she says audiences will find it still has relevance today. “Plays don’t become classics for no reason - they become classics because they’re everlasting. The themes in this are grand; grand themes that transcend into our time. The idea of truth and lies and mendacity that exist in families and society, and how we all present our life and truth - how we’re faced with them and how we deal with them - those things will never die.”

‘CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF’ IS ON NOW AT THE PLAYHOUSE, QPAC UNTIL SEPTEMBER 3.