Reviewed by James
Karas
Eugene O’Neill’s Strange
Interlude has been cut down to less than three and a half hours for its
production by England’s National Theatre on the Lyttleton Stage. That is a good
starting point for this early play.
O’Neill wrote Strange Interlude in 1923 but it was first
produced on Broadway in 1928 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It is an
interesting play to say the least, at times engrossing and at times drowning in
its verbosity.
The plot is fairly straightforward with some risqué elements that caused
problems with censors when it was first produced.
Nina Leeds (Anne Marie Duff) is the daughter of Professor Henry Leeds
(Patrick Drury). She was in love with Gordon Shaw who was killed in World War
I. We never see Gordon but he is a central character in the play. After some
sordid affairs, Nina marries Sam Evans (Jason Watkins), a fool with a head for
business. She becomes pregnant by him but his mother (played by Geraldine
Alexander) tells her that insanity runs in the Evans family. Here comes the
risqué part: Nina aborts her child and conceives another one with Dr. Ned
Darrell (Darren Pettie). Her husband believes that the son, named Gordon after
Nina’s first lover, is his while she falls in love with the real father.
That could be the plot of a melodrama where the lovers fear being found
out, there are divided loyalties, hand-wringing and eventual something-or-other.
All those elements exist in O’Neill’s play but they are of secondary
importance.
O’Neill wants us to know what each character is thinking and each character’s
interpretation of what others are saying or thinking. The method he uses is
that of the aside or the soliloquy. All of the characters comment on what they
really think after they say something. They simply change their tone of voice
and speak their mind as if the other person does not hear what they are saying.
That is not an occasional occurrence but a constant thread throughout the play.
Even when we see the child Gordon as an 11-year old, he says his part of the
dialogue and then adds an aside comment.
There were times when I thought that these characters are not people
but amateur psychoanalysts staring at their bellybuttons and constantly
analyzing what they and everyone else was saying.
As happens in better plays by O’Neill, you do get sucked in by the very
verbosity of the work and watch and wait for the next turn in the plot however
slowly it may arrive.
The performers/self-analysts are led by Duff. Her Nina is a slender
woman with no particular intellectual attraction or sexual magnetism and I
could not figure out why so many men seemed to
fall in love with her. The handsome Charles Marsden (Charles Edwards) is in
love with her, the successful, brilliant and fine-looking Dr. Darrell spends a
lifetime running away and returning to her. Her husband is very loving and if
he were not so dumb he would have known that his son was fathered by another
man.
The play takes a whole generation from Nina’s love affairs to the death
of Sam by which time son Gordon (Wilf Scolding) has grown up and is ready to
marry the lovely Madeline (Emily Plumtree).
Despite the risqué features, the play takes the high moral ground. Sam
and Gordon are never told about who the father of Gordon really is. When Sam
suffers a stroke Nina nurses him until his death instead of abandoning him to his fate.
One aspect of the production that deserves unstinting praise is the
staging and stage design of Soutra Gilmour. The interior of the Leeds home from
study to sitting room and a boat from which to watch a rowing race are shown
richly and magnificently on the Lyttleton’s revolving stage.
The actors handled the roles very well and in fact made them look very
easy. 45Director Simon Godwin deserves high praise as well for keeping the
interesting psychodrama moving and let that be the last word for the play – interesting
_____
Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill opened on June 4 and continues until September 1, 2013 in repertory at the Lyttleton Stage, National Theatre, South Bank, London, England. http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/
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