Mourning Mourning
By Marvin Carlson
Mourning Becomes Electra
By Eugene O'Neill
The National Theatre, London
It is an ongoing embarrassment to the American
theatre that one is distinctly more likely to see major revivals of
American classics in London than in New York. Thus one of the major
offerings in the winter 2003-4 season of the British National Theatre
is Eugene O'Neill's epic Mourning Becomes Electra, playing in the Lyttleton
from November 17, 2003 to January 31, 2004.
The production team is a powerful one, with an
impressive case headed by two of the leading figures in the London theatre,
Helen Mirren and Tim Piggot-Smith as Christine and Ezra Mannon with,
in the central role of Lavinia, Eve Best, who burst onto the London
scene in 1999 with a brilliant 'Tis Pity She's a Whore at the
Young Vic, and who has since become one of the National's most honored
younger actresses. Howard Davies, the director, is internationally known
for his work at the National and the Royal Shakespeare Company as well
as for a number of Broadway productions including the American classics
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Iceman Cometh. Designer
Bob Crowley is equally well known on both sides of the Atlantic and
for opera and musical theatre as well as for straight drama.
With such an impressive gathering of talents
it would be gratifying to report that this production was brilliantly
realized, but to be honest I found it more respectful than moving, more
impressive in its ambition than in its achievement. To begin on a positive
note, Crowley's design, especially for the Mannon front porch, is simply
stunning. We do not see it head on as in the famous Robert Edmund Jones
setting, but from one end, with the house running back on our right,
perpendicular to the footlights, and the perspective interior roof of
the porch covering most of the stage. Three large white columns have
their bases on the porch, but instead of capitals, they extend up through
frayed circular holes in the porch roof, which is painted in fading,
decaying colors to represent an American flag. Beyond this porch is
a dark void, with in the far distance a few tiny structures, possibly
ruins, silhouetted against a red sky in the beginning which grows progressively
darker. Parallel to the footlights, two long low steps leading up to
the porch and scattered with fallen leaves, run across the width of
the stage and are frequently used for intimate conversations.
The interior settings are less striking, but
effective in their expressionistic simplicity. For each of them, a high
red wall runs at a sharp perspective angle upstage, repeating the angle
of the porch. Although the minimal furnishings-chairs, Ezra's bed, the
study desk-suggest different spaces, the strong visual lines and color
of the set make all these rooms seem much the same, and all of them
perhaps better suited to Strindberg's Dance of Death than to
the Mannon mansion. Brant's ship is considerably more daring and more
successful. The huge flag/ceiling is lowered to form the upper deck
of the ship, though running at a steep angle upward from right to left.
Because of the holes in the porch roof it is able to drop down around
the columns, which now read as masts. In the larger below-deck space
to the left is Brant's cabin, and the scene where Orin and Lavinia on
deck listen to Brant and Christine below, the pair often falling into
the same physical relationships, is extremely effective. The lighting,
by Mark Henderson, reflects that strong emotionality in this scene and
others with sharp contrasts in volume and color of light in different
parts of the stage and with powerful use of low lighting angles.
The heavily Freudian relationships in O'Neill's
work and their melodramatic expression offer a formidable challenge
to even the best actors, especially in an era preferring subtler emotional
effects. Too subdued and realistic a performance makes the lines and
situations seem crude and extreme, while a more exaggerated style risks
distancing the audience. In terms of blocking, Davis has decided upon
a straightforward approach, which could almost serve as a textbook example
of showing relationships through movement. The first scene between Adam
Brant (Paul McGann) and Lavinia is typical, every nuance of their relationship
carefully represented in the blocking, so that the constant pattern
of her moving to a new location and his following and moving in on her
in different area around the stage becomes so clear and repetitive as
to be faintly comic. I suspect that an audience member who did not understand
a word of English would be able to follow the tensions and relationships
clearly through the movement alone. This might seem a virtue, but in
a work with such clear and often repetitive development of emotional
relationships it ultimately becomes rather flat and predictable.
A greater problem, however, is the acting, beginning
with the accents. Some English actors can do American accents brilliantly.
I will never forget how impeccably they were managed in Olivier's famous
1973 production of Long Day's Journey into Night. On the other
hand even major productions can fail disastrously on this matter, as
did Michael Gambon's much-honored View from the Bridge in 1987.
Unhappily, this production is much closer to the latter model than the
former, and to American ears it is almost constantly jarring. It is
difficult to imagine just what sort of "New England" accent was being
attempted, but it comes out as a mélange of standard stage British,
Bostonian, modified southern (say, Tennessee), and occasionally distinct
Brooklynese. Some actors naturally handle this better than others. Piggot-Smith
is generally quite acceptable and McGann is not bad. Both Mirren and
Best also do fairly well, although neither of them seems quite sure
what to do with either r's or final g's, and in fact attempt a fairly
wide variety of alternatives. Paul Hilton as Orin is a linguistic disaster,
ranging up and down the east coast from Massachusetts to the Carolinas,
with certain words and phrases that are unmistakably from Brooklyn.
Jana Washington, listed as the dialect coach, claims some fifty productions
in major London theatres among her credits, including not a few American
works, some of which I have seen and found quite acceptable on this
score. Perhaps O'Neill's somewhat hysterical New England speech was
too eccentric for her, or perhaps the project did not allow her enough
time (there was still a surprising insecurity in lines in general the
night I attended, more than a month into the run), but the result was,
at least for an American, most troubling.
Hilton's difficulty with his accent was by no
means his own problem. Taking strongly the often repeated references
to Orin's childishness, weakness and instability, he presented almost
from the outset a character so internally disturbed, unpleasant, and
erractic that he soon exhausted any sympathy or patience the audience
may have had. This essentially left Best to carry the last half of the
play alone, with little help from the crushingly bland Peter (Domnic
Rowan) and Hazel (Rebecca Johnson). The clearest indication of the failing
power of the later scenes in this production was that O'Neill's melodramatic
relationships and situations, which the formidable acting skills of
Mirren and Piggot-Smith had managed to keep convincing, even moving
in the first half of the production, began to arouse audience resistance
as the evening went on and the burden of the piece fell on Hilton and
Best. The clearest indication of this was the laughter (never heard
in the first half of the production) which began to greet such lines
as Hazel's line to Orin, "I know something is worrying you," immediately
following one of Hilton's semi-lunatic outbursts. When such laughter
greets Hilton's portentous announcement, "I'm just going in the study
to clean my pistol," it is clear that the audience's emotional sympathy
for the production has been lost. Of course this is the stuff of melodrama,
but the challenge of the play is precisely to capture the power of melodrama
without tipping over in this way into melodramatic parody.
The production admittedly has many extremely
powerful moments and sequences, especially in the scenes between Mirren
and Piggot-Smith. Their first dialogue on the porch and final scene
in the fatal bedroom display an admirable intensity and brilliant emotional
range. But frontloading Mourning Becomes Electra with one's
strongest actors, one of whom appears only in the first play of the
trilogy and the other only in the first two, is almost a recipe for
a disappointing arc in production.
The smaller roles are on the whole competently
although not strikingly rendered, but James Smith does a lovely comic
turn as the pompous Doctor Blake at Ezra's funeral, and Clarke Peters
is one of the production's solid delights, both in the cameo role of
the Chantyman and, more substantively, as the chorus/gardener Seth Beckwith,
who always manages to convey by the subtlest of means that he understands
far more about what is going on than this situation and his cultural
placement allows him to say. One wishes that any one of the haunted
Mannons had half his insight into themselves or their condition.