Close to perfect on stage but far from stellar in the stalls
I have seen five productions of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night in several countries. Two were good; the rest variably bad. But I have always been of the opinion that a near-perfect production of such an intensely difficult work would be well-nigh impossible.
I was wrong; Garry Hynes's production of the American classic for Druid at the Town Hall in Galway, and transferring to the Dublin Theatre Festival, is as close to perfect as dammit. The acting is strung as tautly and chillingly as a garrotte wire, and the direction is intensely, relentlessly, almost arrogantly slow and unforgiving. The result is an enveloping nightmare of pain and horror without surcease that leaves the audience bled dry of emotion (or should, of which more later), and longing for the cool refreshment of a white bed in a light-filled room. This is, as O'Neill intended, the black night of the soul.
Hynes's direction also maintains a rigid awareness of actual truth as well as theatrical truth: you never forget that the build-up of slow, horrible drama of lives irretrievably damned is also calmly and unexaggeratedly a verbal photograph of the O'Neill family. Edmund, O'Neill himself, is already doomed by the effort of intellectual escape as much as by his advancing tuberculosis, and Jamie is already in the grip of a destructive, violent ennui that will end his life before its time.
Around them, behind them, above and below, stalk and crawl James and Mary Tyrone, the parents whose egotism, self-indulgence, and emotional maiming of themselves, each other, and their sons is Greekly Olympian in its compass.
As for the acting, with each set piece you feel, "he/she just edges out the others". But you're wrong: this ensemble soars. The distinguished American veteran James Cromwell is James Tyrone, destructive, destroyed and innately bewildered at his own ghastly achievement. Marie Mullen is Mary, one of the great female roles of the 20th century, twitching and coquetting grotesquely and pathetically as she sinks into morphine-raddled oblivion. Michael Esper rises to breathtaking heights as the broken Edmund, and Aidan Kelly is all tragic, wounded bluster as Jamie. Newcomer Maude Fahy also delivers herself well in the almost unplayable role of the drunken Irish maid Cathleen.
Francis O'Connor's design is absolutely perfect in its bleak, ungracious seediness, with equally perfect lighting from Davy Cunningham.
With all this towering achievement, it was a pity that the intelligentsia of Galway saw fit to fidget, cough, drink alcohol (yes, it was permitted in the auditorium) before cracking their plastic cups, texting, and passing such moronic remarks as "Isn't it awful to see Marie Mullen wasted on such a load of rubbish?" "No, I haven't laughed yet, but I will when she dies," "Isn't the acting awful ... except for Marie, of course" and "Why did Garry want to put on this crap?"
IF the Russian dance troupe Derevo celebrated the life force at the Fringe Festival, the Lia Rodrigues Dance company from Brazil takes us through the nightmare of its fragility. The company's piece Incarnat was at the Beckett Centre, and throttled its audience with the reality of the flesh "incarnate": its composition of bone, blood, muscle and flesh, and how easily that can be reduced to a bloody pulp.
The piece was inspired, apparently, by Susan Sontag's essay "The Pain of Others" and it is an intense, sometimes nauseating cry from the soul against abuse and torture. There are no punches pulled here for those with hearts to understand and intellects to protest; torture exists, institutionalised and refined, and mutilates the body as it destroys the spirit and deprives the consciousness.
Sobering, shocking stuff, with gut-wrenching choreography performed with obvious commitment and superb discipline by a clearly highly-trained company.
Mark Ravenhill's Some Explicit Polaroids seems extraordinarily dated. Yet Shopping and Fucking, his first play, dates only from 1996. This GoLightly production at Players' Theatre in Trinity gave the impression of dating from 1983, with its anti-Thatcher class nihilism, and a central theme of doomed and inevitable death from AIDS. It is living proof that there is nothing so dated as fashion; and AIDS blighting the western world, particularly the homosexual western world, is no longer the consuming theme of topical writing. Nor, despite a couple of good performances, does Shane Carr's production manage to make the piece hang together; all of the players give the impression of being on solo runs without having had much consultation about the purpose and meaning of what they're doing.
And as a naturalistic piece, there was just too much co-incidence about the meetings and partings of the supposedly disparate group that comprises a Russian rent boy, a London whiz kid with a death wish, a lap-dancer, a rich and crass businessman, a would-be Labour MP, and a hapless ex-con who served time for grievous bodily harm.
Stereotypical hard-left stuff? You bet. Boring? I'm afraid so.
