Review The Hairy Ape

The Hairy Ape

By Eugene O'Neill

A Stoker's Progress
http://www.oldvictheatre.com/whats-on/2015/the-hairy-ape/ 

Off to the palladial Old Vic to catch up on somewhat of a curiosity - Eugene O'Neill's 1922 satiric Expressionist play The Hairy Ape - a gorilla (as opposed to a guerrilla ;) ) play, eleven years before King Kong graced our screens.

Descending into a ship's sulphur yellow engine room, meet "Yank" (Bertie Carvel), the lead stoker or fireman, characterised by his brawn rather than brains as he mechanically shovels coal.   Part Popeye, part Marlon Brando, both later incarnations. 

But what surprised TLT and her free-thinking hatchback  is the resemblance to a reversed Rev Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies with Yank  like "the little black gorilla" chimney sweep literally below the surface. It's almost as if Irish American O'Neill engaged in a debate with Protestant English Victorian clergyman Kingsley, at the same time artistically embracing but also fearful of succumbing to social Darwinism.

However, unlike the begrimed chimney sweep of the fairy tale, Yank is a Frankenstein water baby who never finds redemption in this one-act 90 minute play.  

In eight scenes rhythmically directed by Richard Jones, Yank is propelled towards his fate via encounters with marionette-like church and party-going New York bourgeoisie and a book-driven workers' movement. 

Finally killed by political sentiment, deluded into a sense of brotherhood and commonality with an ape (Phil Hill deserves more than a mention for a memorable performance!), his bones are snapped like a puppet or clockwork doll by the animal whom he believes he can embrace and free.

In between he is a workhorse spurred into a kind of awakening. First by a lyrical whisky-drinking Irishman Paddy (Steffan Rhodri)  recalling the days of sailing clippers dependent on weather not machines.   

Then his own reverse Water Babies' Ellie, chaperoned steel heiress Mildred Douglas (Rosie Sheehy) who, wishing to play out academic social work theories learned at college, descends to the stokehold, only to seal Yank's fate, branding the fireman "a filthy beast" before melodramatically fainting.

Indeed it almost felt like The Truman Show before its time - with so much foreshadowing and characters testing out Yank's reactions before the inevitable end. 

Led by Long (Callum Dixon), the galley's Marxist agitator, into Manhattan's consumer society, Yank finally loses his passivity and registers with a political party after reading a newspaper in prison. But then turned on by his comrades, he's branded a possible spy and ends up in the zoo in front of the ape's cage.   

One can't help thinking such filmic and art school disenchantment may also have helped pave the way for mid twentieth century dictatorships and propaganda.  

It's a hair shirt of a play, five years after theory had also driven the bloodshed and famines of the Soviet Revolution.  Striking design by Stewart Laing (plus a stonking gorilla outfit, Stewart!), lighting by Mimi Jordan Sherin, choreography by Aletta Collins and sound by Sarah Angliss all drive Yank's progress. 

Even if the inaudibility of some of the Brooklynese (deliberately so, we think) adds to that hair shirt feeling, Bertie Carvel gives a virtuoso performance as Yank. Yet the combined design, lighting, choreography and sound in some scenes felt a tad too self-conscious for TLT's taste. 

 Was the play ever conceived to be a silent film (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was released in 1920), we wonder? Anyway, a few stills from the original stage production with Louis Wolheim are here   and here.  And an amber/green light for this simian fantasy and four days still until November 21 to see it.

Review The Mentalists

The Mentalists

By Richard Bean

Utopia Or Bust

http://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk/Tickets/TheMentalists/TheMentalists.asp

Imagine, if you will, a Finsbury Park bed and breakfast hotel room. It’s a bit grungy, a nylon bedspread on the double bed, a trouser press on one side, a chair looking like it comes from a hospital ward on the other. A TV mounted on the wall, an ensuite bathroom behind a curtain. A phone on the wall, a plate of meat sandwiches covered with cling film and bowl of fruit.

Rather different from the luxury hotel of the Greek finance minister, The Mentalists’ hotel room has no headed notepaper as far as we could tell. Nevertheless a joke about the Greeks seems now to have an added resonance in this 2002 play.

Enter two men. Ted (Stephen Merchant in a respectable stage debut) or “China” to his friend. He’s a boy-scoutish beanpole, skinny legs poking out of long shorts and short sleeved shirt, fleet manager in a cleaning products firm.  So far, so ordinary with a raft of credit cards even if they do bounce ... But then there’s his scheme, based on the “radical behaviourism” theory of a (real) dodgy social scientist to correct the world with a Utopian community. That’s if Ted can get at least a thousand people at £29.99 each (!!!).

Morrie (Steffan Rhodri hitting exactly the right reassuring tone) is the camp yet butch Walthamstow hairdresser who has agreed to film a promotional video for his friend. Seemingly more stable, he nevertheless has a side line in porn films and tall tales. Like a fluctuating stock exchange, his imaginary father in one fantasy “was the only British boxer to have boxed at every weight. He could put it on, lose it, and then put it on again. Chips.”  But also with material concerns: “Can we sort the money out first China?”

A mini-diversion: have you returned to this blog, lured again by a Twitter or Facebook link  and expecting a review in our modestly ;) inimitable style? Then, in a non-hairdressing way, you have been conditioned.

However if you are a stranger who decided to take Google for a walk and the belief ran through your mind spontaneously the premise of our review is attractive, you are an example of mentalism.  At least, simply speaking and if we understand correctly, that’s the difference between the behaviourist and the mentalist schools of psychology.

Industrial psychologist turned stand up turned playwright Richard Bean wrote this two hander,  as part homage to Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter,  for a National Theatre festival and there are plenty of gags to keep the laughter coming in this two act one hour and 50 minute piece. At the same time, it feels more gag led than character or plot-based and the production a little over-blown for an intimate fringe-type play. We even wondered at one point if it would have worked better set in California on the fringes of Hollywood.

Nevertheless, amazingly, Bean in this 2002 play, methodically directed by Abbey Wright, seems to have had a magic globe, with Ted mentioning a test drive in Iceland (predicting the 2008 financial crash?) and Morrie Cyprus (2012 financial crash?), followed by the uncanny cracks about the Greeks.

The plot when it does kick in feels rather contrived and goes for far fetched cliché, despite Ted’s plan having (an unmentioned) parallel in real life, the government “nudge nudge” agency

Even so, one could say every audience could conform to behaviourism (“Hey, it’s Stephen Merchant, it’s a Richard Bean play, I will laugh, it will be funny!”) or mentalism (“What the hell, know nothing about this, but at these prices it had better be good!”), so maybe in the end it’s two actors in a play riffing on theories. And then of course we the audience are being experimented on like lab rats or Pavlov’s dog. ;) A TLT mentalist or behaviourist (depending on your school of thought) amber light.