Here’s how I measure a play, in my neophyte terms. I always try to stay in a B&B that is about a 30-to-45-minute walk from the theatre. If, on the way home, I am entirely consumed in thinking, because of at least something about the play, then it’s a good play, or at least it is for me at this moment.
Tonight I was.
I had no idea what to expect going in. This was one of the rare times when I didn’t manage to read the text before, and I’d seen only one other O’Neill play, Happy Days (earlier this year at The Young Vic), which is supposed to be entirely atypical of his work: it’s happy.
As with Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” and “View from the Bridge”, I left the theatre hungry for more early to mid-20th Century American drama. What has happened in America, in just a few hundred years is so extraordinary. I know that the massive, bewildering dislocation brought by modernity begins in some ways with the industrial revolution in the UK, and that if one wants truly to come face-to-face with the horrors of the modern, one ought look no further than Germany, which pioneered the use of mustard gas in WWI, and Zyklon B in WWII; nevertheless, the American journey simply cries out to be lived and felt on stage, in a way that nothing else quite can. The ideals, the aspirations, and the reality are all so large.
Like the Americans themselves, I just gotta get more….
The Old Vic’s blurb:
Eugene O’Neill’s timeless story of class and identity.
“Starring Olivier Award winner Bertie Carvel, directed by legendary and multi-award-winning director Richard Jones.
“A classic expressionist masterpiece by Nobel prize-winner Eugene O’Neill, The Hairy Ape tells the story of Yank, played by Bertie Carvel, a labourer who revels in his status as the strongest stoker on a transatlantic ocean liner. But when Yank is called a ‘filthy beast’ by the overbred daughter of a steel merchant, he experiences an awakening of consciousness that leads him on a journey through the wealthy neighbourhoods and disenfranchised underbelly of New York society. Searching for a way to belong, Yank is forced to confront primal questions about his true place in the world.”
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