The Sadly Unintelligible Hirsute Primate

There is so much to admire about the Old Vic’s production of The Hairy Ape – new Artistic Director Matthew Warchus’s selection of Richard Jones to direct the youthful playwright Eugene O’Neill’s searing drama; Stewart Lang’s genuinely imaginative designs; Mimi Jordan Sherin’s lighting vivid, sometimes shocking lighting; and Aletta Collins’s choreography that makes an expressionist ballet of stoking the boilers of the ship aboard which much of this compressed, 90-minute version (of a normally four-hour play)  takes place. Covered in oil stains and soot, the men move their bodies and their shovels with the precision of the Rockettes. It’s a lovely touch of irony: these filthy, all too male bodies, first seen in an anarchic state of drunken revelry, recalling the troupe of disciplined, high-stepping Broadway chorus girls.

Add to this Bertie Carvel, showing his beefy biceps, formerly disguised by the drag in which he played the glorious Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, now as Robert “Yank” Smith in the starring role of the hirsute primate – and this should be a theatrical triumph. In its eight vignettes, O’Neill shows us the mighty Yank progressively stripped of his illusions about himself. It’s an allegory for the degradation of his class, the proletariat, a humiliation of the only group with which he identifies that the thick-witted head stoker is conscious of himself.

Following the bullish aggression of the below-decks binge, there is a scene in which Mildred, whose family makes much of the steel in America and also owns the shipping line, defies her chaperone to go slumming with the stokers. Dressed in a virginal, easy-to-stain white dress, Mildred’s motives in seeing the boilers are a mixture of social work and lust. She is perfectly played as a ditsy 1920s flapper by Rosie Sheehy, who manages to show class-conscious disgust at her first sight of the grubby man-machines who actually make the ship do its “twenty-five knots a’ hour,” and sees the boss, Yank, as a hairy ape. This causes him to conceive a resentment, first against her, which rapidly grows to take in her entire class.

In a later vignette, Yank and a mate are ashore on Fifth Avenue, when an ensemble of white-masked bourgeoisie leave church, discuss the sermon, and break into a terrific Charleston, ending in violence and jail for Yank. Always in search of a club that will have him as a member, Yank knocks on the door of the International Workers of the World, the “Wobblies.”  In the best (and only funny) scene in the play, the Wobblies insist to Yank that they are devoted to achieving revolution by peaceful means exclusively, and have prim prissy palpitations when he displays his bundle of dynamite.  This is O’Neill (and Richard Jones) at their ironic best.

Let me quote (from memory), the not very pacific verse, chorus, and part of another verse satirising a Wobblie anthem:

 

In our prison cells we sit

Covered with reaction’s sh*t

While our sweat fills Mr Morgan’s filthy tills;

And the fascists as they passed

Jammed Taft-Hartley (§)

Up our arse.

Yes, I guess we’ve had

Our goddamned f***ing fill.

 

Fight, fight fight for revolution,

Vote, vote, vote the peoples’ way,

Arise ye workers of the world,

Let your banners be unfurled,

Fight the dying forces of bourgeois decay.

 

           O we’ll get our bloody guns

And we’ll turn them on the nuns

And we’ll burn the Sistine Chapel to the ground…

 

(§) The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act restricted the rights of trades unions

 

 

You can see why I found the scene of the Wobblie HQ looking like the London Library so very clever and amusing. Brecht couldn’t have improved on it – and probably never wrote anything so witty. And Richard Jones makes the most of it – he is, for my money and to my taste – the best of directors.

So why is the Old Vic’s The Hairy Ape such a sad failure?

The fact is –  many of my theatre critic colleagues agree, and everyone sitting near me at the press performance – it was extremely difficult, sometimes impossible, to hear Bertie Carvel’s (and thus O’Neill’s) words.  Carvel was made to adopt a dialect that, for all his shouting, was unintelligible. On this I am an authority, as I am bilingual in English and American. If what Carvel was speaking was a dialect of my American youth, I should certainly have been able to recognise more than every fifth or sixth morpheme. In every other respect Carvel’s performance is magnificent, from his gymnastics to his final pathetic slump; but what can you make of a play whose words, though they purport to be in your own language, you cannot hear?

It is rare that a drama of this sort has villains who are not members of the cast but of the production team, but I think the guilty deserve naming: the programme lists Rick Lipton as “Voice & Dialect Coach” and Majella Hurley as “Dialect Coach.”

Shame on them. Perhaps the rest of the run of the play could be salvaged by displaying surtitles.

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