It can be disconcerting to see an entire
audience miss an unsubtle reference. As elderly Ephraim Cabot recited a
series of outré similes for parts of his young bride’s body, the
opening-night house laughed more and more freely at each one. No one
seemed to register that astringent, Old Testament-loving Ephraim had
resorted to the only language of love he knew by quoting the
Song of Songs. Eugene O’Neill’s
play is less than 90 years old; in that time the Bible has evidently
lost not only its religious but also its literary familiarity. On such
evidence, O’Neill’s project with
Desire
Under The Elms would be doomed: like his
Mourning Becomes Electra it recasts
a Greek myth in an American setting, in this case the story of
Phaedra’s near-incestuous love for Hippolytus on a small New England
farm, as Ephraim’s bride Abbie falls instead for his youngest son Eben.
This classical spine of the story is, however, given numerous new
limbs. Future title to the farm becomes a crucial motive: before
Ephraim and Abbie even enter, we see Eben buying out his elder
half-brothers’ expectations before they depart for California, and the
final phase of the play hinges on whether the household’s new baby
(fathered by Eben, unbeknownst to Ephraim) will usurp Eben’s own
prospects. Unlike Euripides’ version, stepmother and stepson face only
arrest, albeit with the possibility of hanging for infanticide. And
most crucially, the central love is both requited and consummated.
Denise Gough’s Abbie has a quiet, magnetic intensity, moving from
seemingly blithe beginnings to a fatalistic distress. Finbar Lynch
makes believable Ephraim’s claim that the loneliest periods of his life
were his marriages; this is a man who cannot communicate. (He is also,
no matter how well-preserved and vigorous Ephraim is supposed to be,
plainly nothing like 76 years old.) Morgan Watkins is less compelling
as Eben, as dedicated to his dead mother as Hippolytus is to the
goddess Artemis. The farmhouse itself becomes a character of sorts, the
various rooms of Ian MacNeil’s set trucking on, off and around the
stage in a ghostly architectural ballet. Sean Holmes’ production does
not quite gel, with erratic accents and a wildly misjudged choric
interpretive-dance sequence, but it is none the less an honourable
addition to the British stage’s ongoing rediscovery of O’Neill.
Written for the Financial
Times.