Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 play is a devil to stage. But Richard Jones’s production, running 90 minutes as opposed to the four hours of the Peter Stein version seen at the National in 1987, succeeds by treating the play for what it is: a stunning expressionist spectacle in which images count as much as words.
O’Neill’s protagonist Yank – played with an adenoidal Brandoesque drawl by Bertie Carvel – is a truculent stoker on a transatlantic liner who deludes himself that he belongs in the new machine-made world: “I’m de muscles in steel,” he proudly boasts, “de punch behind it.” In eight short scenes, O’Neill shows Yank to be kidding himself. Dismissed as “a filthy beast” by an industrial tycoon’s daughter, Yank displays a rampaging violence that disturbs even his own shipmates.
Vowing class revenge, Yank finds himself rejected wherever he turns: by the Fifth Avenue socialites he insults and by the unionised Industrial Workers of the World for whom he proves too explosive. Only in the Zoo, where he confronts a caged gorilla, does Yank meet a kindred spirit, but that too proves an illusion.
The power of Jones’s production lies in reminding us of how much 1920s American drama owed to German expressionism. Stewart Laing’s design and Mimi Jordan Sherin’s lighting create a series of unforgettable images, including the sulphurous hell of the ship’s stokehole, the ghoulish parade of the masked New York bourgeoisie and the antiseptic orderliness of the union headquarters, with its uniform volumes stacked on underpopulated shelves.
Superb as the visuals are, I wish that Jones’s production paid more attention to O’Neill’s language. Edmund Wilson once shrewdly observed that, whereas O’Neill’s middle-class characters are prosily repetitive, a working-class figure like Yank has “a mouth-filling rhythmical eloquence.” Yank, after all, revealingly says: “I ain’t got no past to tink in, nor nothin’ dat’s comin’, on’y what’s now.” To be fair, that line sings out in Bertie Carvel’s fine performance, which exactly catches Yank’s social alienation and internal struggle.
Carvel, as we know from his Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, has an extraordinary physicality that, whether shovelling coal into a ship’s furnace or swinging from a steel girder on Fifth Avenue, he leaves behind an indelible impression. It’s a courageously inventive performance that few of his contemporaries could match, but even Carvel could do more to relish the language. But that is my only cavil about a rare and exhilarating revival of a play that shows the ability of expressionism to pin down the encaged isolation of the eternally oppressed.
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