Bertie Carvel has become a solid name at British theatre box-offices since he dragged up as Miss Trunchbull in the musical of Roald Dahl’s Matilda (which he recently slyly self-parodied as the crossdressing Pentheus in Euripides’ Bakkhai) and his front-half-of-the-title role in the BBC-TV adaptation of Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell. He can be a protean actor, and it was some time before I recognised him beneath the sweat and grime which coat Yank, the scourge of the ocean-liner engine room in the first scenes of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922).

The culture among the stokers is aggressively macho, and Yank outdoes the lot. However, when he finds himself on the streets of New York, burning for revenge against the first-class passenger (and daughter of the nation’s steel kingpin) who had reacted to him as if he were the ape of the title, his simple notions of physical toughness as an index of social “belonging” fall apart. The mode of belonging on land is that of industrial capitalism: not simply wealth, but adherence to its structures and conventions. Yank finds that, instead of the valued ruler of his workplace, he has been just a cog in a machine which mechanises whole populations.

Director Richard Jones and designer Stewart Laing envisage the engine-room scenes in an almost Futurist style, but on land the mode is more Expressionistic. Sets are flown in under dazzling yellow lighting, a Fifth Avenue crowd are masked and almost faceless, and the moon appears as a large balloon emblazoned with the face of another of the company. (It is Steffan Rhodri, one of – to be blunt – our most Welsh actors, who has earlier delivered a marvellous set-piece speech about the old days under sail, in a thick and accurate Dublin accent.) This is a world away from naturalism, and yet the experience of Yank’s disintegration, all the way to the gorilla house at the zoo, feels entirely natural. The whole 90-minute experience is, as my companion put it, as disconcerting as the recently discovered photograph of Billy the Kid playing croquet and yet just as unquestionably American; it is as contemporary a century on as when it was written.

Written for the Financial Times.