It is an ongoing embarrassment to the American
theatre that one is distinctly more likely to see major revivals
of American classics in London than in New York. Thus one of the
major offerings in the winter 2003-4 season of the British National
Theatre is Eugene O'Neill's epic Mourning Becomes Electra,
playing in the Lyttleton from November 17, 2003 to January 31,
2004.
The production team is a powerful one,
with an impressive case headed by two of the leading figures in
the London theatre, Helen Mirren and Tim Piggot-Smith as Christine
and Ezra Mannon with, in the central role of Lavinia, Eve Best,
who burst onto the London scene in 1999 with a brilliant 'Tis
Pity She's a Whore at the Young Vic, and who has since become
one of the National's most honored younger actresses. Howard Davies,
the director, is internationally known for his work at the National
and the Royal Shakespeare Company as well as for a number of Broadway
productions including the American classics Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof and The Iceman Cometh. Designer Bob Crowley
is equally well known on both sides of the Atlantic and for opera
and musical theatre as well as for straight drama.
With such an impressive gathering of talents
it would be gratifying to report that this production was brilliantly
realized, but to be honest I found it more respectful than moving,
more impressive in its ambition than in its achievement. To begin
on a positive note, Crowley's design, especially for the Mannon
front porch, is simply stunning. We do not see it head on as in
the famous Robert Edmund Jones setting, but from one end, with
the house running back on our right, perpendicular to the footlights,
and the perspective interior roof of the porch covering most of
the stage. Three large white columns have their bases on the porch,
but instead of capitals, they extend up through frayed circular
holes in the porch roof, which is painted in fading, decaying
colors to represent an American flag. Beyond this porch is a dark
void, with in the far distance a few tiny structures, possibly
ruins, silhouetted against a red sky in the beginning which grows
progressively darker. Parallel to the footlights, two long low
steps leading up to the porch and scattered with fallen leaves,
run across the width of the stage and are frequently used for
intimate conversations.
The interior settings are less striking,
but effective in their expressionistic simplicity. For each of
them, a high red wall runs at a sharp perspective angle upstage,
repeating the angle of the porch. Although the minimal furnishings-chairs,
Ezra's bed, the study desk-suggest different spaces, the strong
visual lines and color of the set make all these rooms seem much
the same, and all of them perhaps better suited to Strindberg's
Dance of Death than to the Mannon mansion. Brant's ship
is considerably more daring and more successful. The huge flag/ceiling
is lowered to form the upper deck of the ship, though running
at a steep angle upward from right to left. Because of the holes
in the porch roof it is able to drop down around the columns,
which now read as masts. In the larger below-deck space to the
left is Brant's cabin, and the scene where Orin and Lavinia on
deck listen to Brant and Christine below, the pair often falling
into the same physical relationships, is extremely effective.
The lighting, by Mark Henderson, reflects that strong emotionality
in this scene and others with sharp contrasts in volume and color
of light in different parts of the stage and with powerful use
of low lighting angles.
The
heavily Freudian relationships in O'Neill's work and their melodramatic
expression offer a formidable challenge to even the best actors,
especially in an era preferring subtler emotional effects. Too
subdued and realistic a performance makes the lines and situations
seem crude and extreme, while a more exaggerated style risks distancing
the audience. In terms of blocking, Davis has decided upon a straightforward
approach, which could almost serve as a textbook example of showing
relationships through movement. The first scene between Adam Brant
(Paul McGann) and Lavinia is typical, every nuance of their relationship
carefully represented in the blocking, so that the constant pattern
of her moving to a new location and his following and moving in
on her in different area around the stage becomes so clear and
repetitive as to be faintly comic. I suspect that an audience
member who did not understand a word of English would be able
to follow the tensions and relationships clearly through the movement
alone. This might seem a virtue, but in a work with such clear
and often repetitive development of emotional relationships it
ultimately becomes rather flat and predictable.
A greater problem, however, is the acting,
beginning with the accents. Some English actors can do American
accents brilliantly. I will never forget how impeccably they were
managed in Olivier's famous 1973 production of Long Day's
Journey into Night. On the other hand even major productions
can fail disastrously on this matter, as did Michael Gambon's
much-honored View from the Bridge in 1987. Unhappily,
this production is much closer to the latter model than the former,
and to American ears it is almost constantly jarring. It is difficult
to imagine just what sort of "New England" accent was being attempted,
but it comes out as a mélange of standard stage British, Bostonian,
modified southern (say, Tennessee), and occasionally distinct
Brooklynese. Some actors naturally handle this better than others.
Piggot-Smith is generally quite acceptable and McGann is not bad.
Both Mirren and Best also do fairly well, although neither of
them seems quite sure what to do with either r's or final g's,
and in fact attempt a fairly wide variety of alternatives. Paul
Hilton as Orin is a linguistic disaster, ranging up and down the
east coast from Massachusetts to the Carolinas, with certain words
and phrases that are unmistakably from Brooklyn. Jana Washington,
listed as the dialect coach, claims some fifty productions in
major London theatres among her credits, including not a few American
works, some of which I have seen and found quite acceptable on
this score. Perhaps O'Neill's somewhat hysterical New England
speech was too eccentric for her, or perhaps the project did not
allow her enough time (there was still a surprising insecurity
in lines in general the night I attended, more than a month into
the run), but the result was, at least for an American, most troubling.
Hilton's difficulty with his accent was
by no means his own problem. Taking strongly the often repeated
references to Orin's childishness, weakness and instability, he
presented almost from the outset a character so internally disturbed,
unpleasant, and erractic that he soon exhausted any sympathy or
patience the audience may have had. This essentially left Best
to carry the last half of the play alone, with little help from
the crushingly bland Peter (Domnic Rowan) and Hazel (Rebecca Johnson).
The clearest indication of the failing power of the later scenes
in this production was that O'Neill's melodramatic relationships
and situations, which the formidable acting skills of Mirren and
Piggot-Smith had managed to keep convincing, even moving in the
first half of the production, began to arouse audience resistance
as the evening went on and the burden of the piece fell on Hilton
and Best. The clearest indication of this was the laughter (never
heard in the first half of the production) which began to greet
such lines as Hazel's line to Orin, "I know something is worrying
you," immediately following one of Hilton's semi-lunatic outbursts.
When such laughter greets Hilton's portentous announcement, "I'm
just going in the study to clean my pistol," it is clear that
the audience's emotional sympathy for the production has been
lost. Of course this is the stuff of melodrama, but the challenge
of the play is precisely to capture the power of melodrama without
tipping over in this way into melodramatic parody.
The production admittedly has many extremely
powerful moments and sequences, especially in the scenes between
Mirren and Piggot-Smith. Their first dialogue on the porch and
final scene in the fatal bedroom display an admirable intensity
and brilliant emotional range. But frontloading Mourning Becomes
Electra with one's strongest actors, one of whom appears
only in the first play of the trilogy and the other only in the
first two, is almost a recipe for a disappointing arc in production.
The smaller roles are on the whole competently
although not strikingly rendered, but James Smith does a lovely
comic turn as the pompous Doctor Blake at Ezra's funeral, and
Clarke Peters is one of the production's solid delights, both
in the cameo role of the Chantyman and, more substantively, as
the chorus/gardener Seth Beckwith, who always manages to convey
by the subtlest of means that he understands far more about what
is going on than this situation and his cultural placement allows
him to say. One wishes that any one of the haunted Mannons had
half his insight into themselves or their condition.
Mourning
Mourning 
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