Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ legacy lives on largely thanks to the iconic Audrey Hepburn. Black and white and pearls and a window in the rain lingered in the corners of my mind long after watching the film based on Truman Capote’s novella.

That was until I saw Samuel Adamson’s recent adaptation for the stage at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Anna Friel as Holly Golightly was enchanting; though not in control of her own emotions, she had complete power over ‘Fred’, who isn’t Fred at all and is played by Joseph Cross. She was precocious yet shy, flirtatious yet isolated, as if she had all the other characters on extendable leads, and had locked them at a metre’s distance to prevent them from getting up close and personal. And Holly’s tragedy was perfectly counter-balanced by Fred’s cringingly funny potential older woman, Madame Spanella, who came on to him incessantly and without shame, freely offering him as much ‘filet mignon’ as he pleased.

What with this humour, these unpredictable characters and a fair bit of nudity in a bath, this ought to have been the ultimate show stopper, the most fantastic crowd pleaser, an undeniable sell-out. And at the time I really thought it was. I genuinely believed I was thoroughly enjoying myself.

But I realise now that that can’t be entirely true. Aside from the Tiffany’s blue in which the set was painted being somewhat out of place on the outside wall of a high rise block of New York flats, there was the problem of the cat. Now, I’m all for animals on stage; after all, why not? It’s not as if he were a lion which ought to be on an African savannah. And ‘No Name’, as Holly so innocently names him, is a crucial part of the story.

 Listen, then, if you will, to my problem:
The cat is a pretty average, ginger cat (though I shall confess now that I’m no expert).

He (or she) came on stage a couple of times to be cuddled by Holly or to walk out of his cage door when it was opened, to nuzzle up to his not-owner and go back into his cage again. Admittedly he did that last bit completely by himself which suggests some training, which was perhaps deserving of the croons from a significant proportion of the audience.

Crooning aside, I had considered myself happy with the cat. Then, on my way home, I received a text informing me he receives £200 a show for doing the above. £200!

Call me jealous or ignorant or what you will, but I find it all a little baffling to give an animal so much money. I concede that the likes of Free Willy and Lassie perhaps deserve their financial reward, their training being far more rigorous and the results more spectacular, not to mention their keep. But surely a line can be drawn somewhere? A perilously steep and rocky ravine divides this cat from the two aforementioned animal stars. I bet Disney didn’t pay the pigeons in their version of ‘Mary Poppins’ – and they did synchronised flying.
 

However, rant over, I shall pretend I never heard about the cat’s wages. Instead I shall think only of Holly and Fred’s intense and meandering relationship so tenderly portrayed as they moved amongst New York’s well-evoked, dreadfully seedy high society. I shall muse over their ride through Central Park which was a mix of hilarity and tragedy, irony and sincerity, and was creatively staged on a platform several metres high at the back of the stage. The false ending, when Holly and Fred parted for good, gave a glimpse of silvery hope, a chance of a happiness in a Tiffany’s box if only Holly would dare to stay or Fred to admit to himself how much of their relationship is on his head; a feat on the actors’ part and on the part of director Sean Mathias.

The real ending, though, is with Fred and Joe, bar owner and another of Holly’s admirers. In stealing it from Fred and Holly, this illusion of Fred’s was pathetically epitomised, and we were left with the sad, lonely men in an empty bar, drinking together and reminiscing over the girl who the papers describe as a whore but who was to them an angel. I felt as lost as they looked, having spent the evening with a man who was not who he so convincingly made himself out to be.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ is on now at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket