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The Hairy Ape

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.37.2.280

2161-4318

Jean Chothia,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Matthew Warchus, the new artistic director of London's Old Vic Company, was consciously bold in deciding to present, in his first season, The Hairy Ape, a play he judged “a remarkable piece of writing which only turns up once in a lifetime.” The excited and largely positive response from press and audiences to “an extraordinary production of an extraordinary play” (The Stage) and “a rare and exhilarating revival” (The Guardian) justified his choice and demonstrated that, ninety-three years after its first production, O'Neill's play, in the hands of an attentive director—in this case, Richard Jones—commands much more than historic interest.O'Neill and London theater have, indeed, done well for each other in recent years. It was after his sparkling Old Vic debut in The Iceman Cometh in 2003 that Kevin Spacey became artistic director of the Old Vic Company. In charge from 2004 to 2015, he turned in a devastating performance as Jamie Tyrone in A Moon for the Misbegotten in 2006. Outstanding among other recent O'Neill productions was Long Day's Journey Into Night with David Suchet at the Apollo in 2012, while Simon Godwin made his National Theatre directorial debut with Strange Interlude the following year. Although I feared this would prove a poisoned chalice for a young director, play and director shone, leading Godwin to mount another marathon for the National: Shaw's Man and Superman with Ralph Fiennes (2015), and, this year, the RSC's Hamlet in Stratford on the quatercentenary of Shakespeare's death.At the Old Vic, Richard Jones demonstrated a clear understanding that O'Neill composed for the stage space; that his scenic effects are thematic, not casual; and that the stage directions are interactive with the dialogue in imaging Yank's social and existential predicament. The Hairy Ape's eight scenes were run straight through with no interval. Notably flexible staging increased the momentum. The caging, already present in O'Neill's text, was emphasized in Stewart Laing's designs, which demonstrated the extent to which, with seemingly very little in the way of stage set, an impression of place, time, and mood can be created by lighting, movement, and space or enclosure. The same cramped, open-fronted box, placed within the wide, darkened stage space, served for forecastle and stokehole scenes, informing the audience of Yank's oppression before he himself realizes he is oppressed. Acid yellow lighting of the ship's living quarters and the wild drunkenness of the men in scenes 1 and 4, changed to fiery red in scene 3 where, at the conditioning sound of a bell, the stokers, miming rhythmic shoveling, became a unit (see figs. 1 and 2). Although the wider stage was used for the scenes on shore, it remained a black hole with spots lighting shop windows, prison cells, the cage at the zoo, and the IWW meeting place. This last was a smaller version of the stokehole box, and the gorilla's cage was a larger version of Yank's prison cell.Bertie Carvel, as Yank, notably athletic in the early scenes—jumping on tables, swinging from bars—conveyed the physical power of the man and his natural leadership in the stokehole, while the succession of tirades flowed seemingly effortlessly. The quality of the lead actor, who—with the exception of scene 2—is on stage throughout, is more than usually crucial in this play. Following the encounter with Mildred, Carvel—who has become newly driven, angry, and horrifyingly bewildered—forced the audience to perceive the terrible waste of human possibility presented by the play. It was a performance worthy of its first interpreter, Louis Wolheim (one of the few actors O'Neill believed to have convincingly embodied one of his characters). But the supporting cast were evidently that—supportive—with mastery of voice and movement. The actors of the secondary roles participated in what was genuine ensemble playing: merging with the rest of the cast as rawly muscular stokers, careless Fifth Avenue strutters, or suspicious members of the IWW Local.This play—pace Warchus—has turned up in a notable production in London at least once before in my lifetime: in Peter Stein's famous Schaubühne version in the 1987 International Season at the National Theatre. Where Jones's production ran for just an hour and a half of grippingly intense action, Stein's lasted some four hours, much of it spent in scene changing. The Stein staging was extraordinary: the whole front of the stage figured as the side of an immense liner for the first four scenes, its deck high above the auditorium and its walls removable to allow a view into the forecastle lower down and—still lower—the stokehole where Yank and his fellows toiled. Whereas that production created, through its detailed construction of individual scenes, a series of lasting visual images, its extended running time dissipated the onward drive of the play, experienced so vividly at the Old Vic. More recently, Kate Budgen directed the play in a tunnel under London Bridge (Southwark Playhouse), a production I unfortunately did not see. (It was reviewed by Katie Johnson in Eugene O'Neill Review 34, no. 1 [2013]: 126–30.)There were departures from some of O'Neill's directions in the Old Vic production. These were largely simplifications of the set, parings down in the interest of speedy scene changing; but, on occasion, they developed suggestions in the text. There were, for example, no tiers of bunks in the forecastle scenes, but there was a makeshift shower where blackened men cleaned off the stokehole dirt. This picked up on the direction at the beginning of scene 4: “Their faces and bodies shine from a soap and water scrubbing, but around their eyes, where a hasty dousing does not touch, the coal-dust sticks like black make-up…. Yank has not washed.” It also served to foreground the “splattering smash as the stream of water hits the steel of Yank's cell” at the end of the prison scene. Just two cages were used in the prison scene and one for the zoo, but O'Neill's description of these seeming to run on “numberless, into infinity” (scene 4) was achieved by a soundscape of mechanical noises, clanging steel, off-stage voices, and chattering animals that was remarkably effective. The sound designer, Sarah Angliss, earned her credit in the program: in a play with little real dialogue (in contrast to its numerous monologues) such context is vital. Among other introductions, a Charleston inserted between the Fifth Avenue and prison scenes worked for me. The dance offered a recognizable period marker, its festivity making the stocking-masked dancers disconcertingly menacing, much as did the imposition of the face of Douglas steel on a balloon carried by one of the walkers on Fifth Avenue, which reappeared as the moon that Yank addresses at the end of the IWW scene.More problematic was the representation of Mildred (Rosie Sheehy). Played less as a bored, effete little rich girl than a wild child, she darted energetically about the stage. Scene 2, more generally, was potentially confusing. Instead of reclining in deckchairs as they talked, Mildred and the aunt walked (or, in Mildred's case, skipped) before a white drop curtain. Although in Peter Stein's production we had to crane our necks uncomfortably to look up at Mildred and the aunt lounging high on the sun deck, it was very clear who and where they were and how their leisure weighed on them. Mildred's tortuous journey down the narrow staircase to the stokehole in the depths of the ship then built anticipation of the meeting with Yank. While the drop curtain at the Old Vic sped the scene change, the context of the scene was somewhat fudged.The other not entirely convincing shift came in the final scene. The gorilla was magnificent, and Yank's addressing it convincing. But Yank, having opened the gorilla's cage, stepped in from the open stage, rather than the gorilla scrambling “gingerly out.” This meant that the fatal embrace took place not on the open stage but behind the bars of the cage from which the gorilla subsequently emerged. The audience was then, inevitably, transfixed by the realistic-seeming gorilla as it left the cage and shuffled off, instead of attending to the man he had crushed—or quite registering that this had happened. I wonder if this change was to avoid a possible echo of King Kong had the gorilla picked up the crushed body and thrown it into the cage, as directed by O'Neill?A recurrent grumble in the reviews, alongside widespread admiration for the staging, the ensemble playing, and Bertie Carvel's mesmeric performance as Yank, concerned audibility. This critique ranged from the damning extreme: “It's terribly spoken—not just inaudible but totally garbled, almost as if no one onstage has a clue what they're saying” (Variety)—to the more measured: “The dialogue is not always intelligible; the noisy sound design sometimes leaves you unable to think” (Independent). Perhaps this had been remedied by the time I saw the production in mid-November, or perhaps it was to the point. Perhaps it was O'Neill's use of polyphony that was disturbing, as, repeatedly through the play, numerous voices say essentially the same thing simultaneously but in different words. The opening direction for “a confused, inchoate uproar swelling into a sort of unity” (scene 1) prescribes an assault on the ear and perhaps too on the audience's assumption that it is necessary to distinguish every word to understand what is being said. Or perhaps this was less a case of mumbling than of the production's faithful reproduction of O'Neill's 1920s slang and low colloquial accents (“skoit,” to refer to Mildred, did puzzle my neighbor). If not all the words were clear, the implication of the words was always apparent.Even more than in Stein's production, the thrust, desolation, and curious joy of O'Neill's play emerged at the Old Vic from the onward drive; the stooped postures; the rhythmic movements; the plangency of Paddy's song, briefly silencing verbal cacophony; the orchestration of voices and sounds; and, finally, the human voice sounding its own desperate condition against the chatter of animals. Meaning and emotion were created from the visual and verbal elements of theater.