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Brutal expose of the beast in modern man

GORDON PARSONS reviews The Hairy Ape

The Hairy Ape at the Old Vic, London SE1

4/5

With Arthur Miller’s centenary currently so well celebrated in British theatres, the Old Vic is to be congratulated on staging a rarely performed play by that lodestar of US drama Eugene O’Neill.

Even more commendable is this choice — not of one of O’Neill’s later major triumphs such as the autobiographical A Long Day’s Journey into Night — but his 1922 savage portrayal of the alienation of modern man trapped in, and part of, the inhuman machine of industrial capitalism.

Bitterly subtitled “A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life,” its protagonist is Yank, the bullyboy in the stokehold of an ocean liner, who rules this living hell-cage with the certainty that his is the power.

As he makes clear, he and his kind are responsible for driving the vessel, smashing through at 25 knots an hour: “Hell in de stokehole? Sure! It takes a man to work in hell, sure, dat’s my fav’rite climate.”

Brutally dismissing the analysis of the exploitative system by a fellow “slave,” his self-assured superiority is punctured when the spoilt daughter of the steel magnate ship’s owner visits this Hades.

She’s there on an indulgent sociological whim to see how the other half exists, only to be revolted when face to face with this “hairy ape.”

Yank’s ensuing journey of would-be revenge into that other more sophisticated hell of New York leads to inevitable tragedy at a zoo in the mortal embrace of a “soulmate” gorilla.

Director Richard Jones and choreographer Alette Collins brilliantly orchestrate O’Neill’s expressionist scenes with vivid symbolism when the riotously drunken and bellowing stokers swing from the roof bars in their workplace menagerie, or when the Fifth Avenue mannequin-like elite in faceless masks remain oblivious to Yank’s provocations.

His futile attempt to join the Wobblies — the Industrial Workers of the World union movement — and his offer to dynamite the steel factories of his oppressors, is treated more naturalistically.

At the centre of this powerful 90-minute drama Bertie Carvel’s Yank, handling the Brooklyn waterfront argot with Brandoesque ease, embodies a delusional, self-destructive vitality.

If O’Neill offered none of Miller’s optimistic if tentative answers — self-recognition and love — to a cruel dehumanising system, his portrayal of human energy seems to imply a possible escape from the cage.

Runs until November 21, box office: oldvictheatre.com

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