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.