Royal Lyceum Theatre,
Edinburgh
Four stars
Light and shade are
everything in Tony Cownie's new production of Eugene O'Neill's mighty
quasi-autobiographical epic. This is the case from the way the house
lights are kept up on the audience during the bright first act of
what initially looks like an everyday family breakfast among the
Tyrone clan led by the patriarchal James, to the way James'
penny-pinching dimming of the living room bulbs reflects the day's
ever darkening mood.
“I've never missed a
performance yet,” says James at one point, and this is the case
both onstage and off for an old ham whose acting career slid into
mediocrity years before. James and his two sons, the feckless James
Jr and the smart but consumptive Edmund are always 'on', especially
when their hopped-up mother Mary is around. Mary's own mask of prim
self-consciousness that hides a lifetime of disappointment slips
after every hit. Years of gathered baggage has left several elephants
in the room, and it's telling that the only honest things that comes
out of anybody's mouth is when their inner ugliness is left exposed
by booze-soaked exchanges where even the whisky is watered down.
Paul Shelley's James is
a more avuncular and less brooding figure than how he's often played,
even though in the end he proves as brittle and as defeated as Diana
Kent's increasingly wraith-like Mary. As James Jr and Edmund, Adam
Best and Timothy N. Evers respectively capture the various shades of
pathetic self-loathing in the sons' inability to neither live up to
their old man's expectations nor break away from them in a family
affair to die for.
The Herald, January 24th 2014
ends
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