Should we be surprised? Cats the musical is a truly bonkers, absolutely deranged piece of popular culture that is also one of the most successful musical productions of all time.

These things are not mutually exclusive: Cats can be a weird and wacky thing and be seen by more than 10 million people on Broadway and become the longest-running musical in London courtesy of its 21-year production span since its debut in 1981. (It is thanks, in part, to Cats that creator Andrew Lloyd Weber has a personal net worth of £715 million, or $937 million.)

How to describe the plot of Cats, though. Stylist editor Kayleigh Dray and Cats superfan explains it thusly: “It’s a musical. About cats.”

That’s it. It does exactly what it says on the tin. The 1982 Playbill review of Cats on Broadway summed up as much when it said: “Cats has no plot, no book, no real story line; it is simply an arrangement of twenty of Eliot’s Old Possum poems for dancers and orchestra.” It noted that the core pull of Cats is its cache of hit songs – Memory is the most memorable, for want of a better word, and will be belted out by no less than Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson in the movie adaptation – and its “revolutionary dance drama”.

We asked a Cats superfan what the musical is actually about, and their answer was baffling