Theatre Royal, Glasgow
4 stars
Eugene O’Neill’s late period epic is a tale of monstrously corrupted
intimacy. While neither parent or sibling sleeplessly pacing the floor
of the Tyrone clan’s wood-lined house have actually caused any harm in
a global sense, but, the damage they inflict on themselves and each
other has consequences that fester before exploding into the sickly
yellow light.
It starts innocuously enough in Anthony Page’s slow-burning but oddly
fast-moving production, with David Suchet’s increasingly compromised
patriarch James swapping mid-morning niceties with Laurie Metcalf as
his fragrant wife Mary and their grown-up sons, feckless first-born
James Junior, played by Trevor White, and Kyle Soller as his fragile
brother Edmund. By the time all stumble together for an after-hours
post-mortem on their sorry lot, their sunny facade has been ripped open
to lay bare assorted litanies of failure, disappointment, bitterness
and addiction.
It would be easy to showboat with such potentially bombastic material,
but, even playing an old theatrical ham more used to touring hotel
rooms than settling anywhere resembling home, Suchet is a master of
controlled understatement. White and Soller too relay all the messed-up
ambitions of such a dysfunctional dynasty. It’s Metcalf who steals
things, though, as, from the initial tilt of her white-haired head and
accompanied by a totter, she says much more about Mary’s state of mind
than O’Neill’s words alone can.
It’s the final image of Metcalf too that lingers at the end of a final
act where something that almost looks like reconciliation gives way to
a doped–up vision of a woman who only wanted a home, but got a life
sentence instead.
The Herald, March 27th 2012
ends
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