January 6, 2004: O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra
January 6, 2004: O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra
National Theatre Lyttelton. Directed by Howard Davies. Lavinia Mannon: Eve Best; Christine Mannon: Helen Mirren; Ezra Mannon: Tim Pigott-Smith; Orin Mannon: Paul Hilton
I was lucky to book a ticket, two weeks ago, to this nearly sold-out production. I almost didn’t try, my recollection of how unreadable the script is being so strong; what puts me off most of all are the stage directions (“slowly, but with mounting anger”), which constantly remind the reader of O’Neill’s mistrust of actors, mistrust of readers’ ability to sense the emotion in the language itself, and most of all O’Neill’s own deep insecurity over the adequacy of his stage language.
This production, like any other, runs head-on into this infirmity, but it has an additional difficulty over how to get English actors to talk some reasonably convincing New England dialect or other. I heard a near-genuine New Hampshire accent among the supporting players — I think it was Simon Merrells as the Reverend Everett Hills — but the other accents were all over the block and included stray tones of deep South (“discuhvah”). The dialect coach, Joan Washington, has very impressive credits, but she failed utterly, this time around, to find a common tongue, and somehow did not notice that one of her actors, Paul McGann, was only half intelligible as Adam Brandt. But, as I say, part of the problem is O’Neill’s own difficulty in finding a stage language adequate to the huge task of rendering these nineteenth-century New England characters convincingly real while at the same time capturing the full amplitude of tragic humanity at which he aimed, as the title of the play and the obvious parallelism with Aeschylus’s ancient trilogy of betrayal, murder, revenge, guilt, and atonement make abundantly clear.
It is in fact painful and intermittently instructive, and ultimately vindicating of O’Neill as well, to watch them struggle, scene after scene and act after act, to wrestle his extremely ambitious design onto the stage, even as a parallel struggle ensues on the part of this devoted and determined cast of actors. A measure of the difficulty they faced can be found in the number of inadvertent laugh lines early on. It almost seemed as if Howard Davies was playing the sardonic qualities of lines, along with their trademark switch-back (“Oh, I didn’t mean that”) qualities, for laughs. But I don’t think he was doing that. It was O’Neill’s own unsureness of tone that was betraying their attempts to play the lines straight and then, finding they were producing laughs, letting the laughs happen and even riding their crests in the best manner of comic timing. Helen Mirren as Christine Mannon was particularly susceptible to this temptation, and at one point I heard a sudden descending tone, toward the end of a speech, that was a sure give-away of her years of experience at playing a line for what it was worth. But her instinct was misplaced here.
After this knowle