[title]
'It takes a man to work in hell', apparently. In this visually unforgettable revival of Eugene O’Neill’s 1920s expressionist classic, that man is ‘Doctor Foster’ star Bertie Carvel, returning to the stage to stoke the engines of an ocean liner and, just possibly, the fires of class revenge. Hell is a rectangular steel box painted a sulphurous yellow. Inside, ten coal-blackened men shovel, drink and laugh hollowly in unison like living silhouettes.
Only the soot-marked walls bear witness to their labour. Until, that is, the abrasively jaded Mildred (Rosie Sheehy) – heiress to a steel industry tycoon – decides to sacrifice one of 50 white dresses on a voyeuristic tour of the lower decks. She comes face to face with Carvel’s Brooklyn-born Yank and, recoiling in horror, brands him ‘a hairy ape’.
In fact, Carvel’s Yank is a tall, greased piston of a man, satisfied with the masculine power he feels at the centre of the ship’s motion. ‘I’m at the bottom, get me?’ he says, swinging from the ceiling bars in his habitat of steel. ‘… I start something and the world moves’ (or rather ‘moives’ – Brooklyn accent, remember).
But Mildred’s ‘Common People’ routine kicks his pride in the nuts and plunges him in to crisis. As the play docks and enters a sequence of strange society scenes, Yank tries to make sense of his hatred and determine his place in the world. ‘Thinking hurts’, he finds, rubbing his shaven hair as if to coax the unpracticed cogs.
Richard Jones’s production is starkly and wittily surreal, its footing destabilised by a tense industrial soundscape. A parade of Fifth Avenue socialites dance a dead-eyed Charleston. The stylish socialist intellectuals at the offices of Industrial Workers of the World pose with slim red volumes on white library ladders. The moon, a balloon in the hand of a champagne-sozzled toff, bears the smugly ubiquitous face of Douglas Steel.
The stokehole is a furnace of fierce, dialect-rich poetry. But O’Neill’s script grows more uneven with the urgency of its metaphors. The tragic ending, in which Yank famously encounters a real ape, isn’t quite as bone-crunchingly gripping as it might be. Instead the lingering image is of a man trapped, finally and disturbingly, by his awakening class consciousness. A pinprick of light expands to a porthole but never much wider. Carvel’s Yank, once explosive with dark energy, is pitifully caught in a narrow prison of light.