The Telegraph, October 30, 2015

The Hairy Ape, Old Vic, review: 'supple and captivating'

By Jane Shilling

The Hairy Ape performed at the Old Vic Theatre. Bertie Carvel as Yank. Credit: Alastair Muir

The precise quality that distinguishes humans from apes has been fiercely debated since Darwinian times, yet the question, “what is a man” continues to intrigue and provoke. In 1922, Eugene O’Neill undertook his own exploration of the conundrum in a play that drew on his own grim experience as a seafarer.

The protagonist of The Hairy Ape is Yank, a fireman aboard a cruise ship sailing out of New York. Above decks the wealthy passengers disport themselves, while below in the stokehold Yank and his colleagues - stripped, sweating and begrimed with coal dust - labour to feed the insatiable furnace.

O’Neill described his play as a mixture of expressionism and naturalism - a blend for which he coined the term “super-naturalism”. In eight scenes Yank evolves from the undisputed alpha male of the stokehold to the (literally) crushed victim of an ape that he has released from its cage at the zoo.

Credit: Alastair Muir

O’Neill’s drama maintains a tense equilibrium between mechanism and humanity. His characters are “types” - Yank, the Everyman (Bertie Carvel) and his colleagues Paddy (Steffan Rhodri), a drunken Irishman lyrically in love with the old days of sail, and Long (Callum Dixon), a radical Socialist; the brittle socialite, Mildred (Rosie Sheehy) and her censorious aunt (Buffy Davis). Nevertheless, they resonate with unstereotypical emotions of rage, longing and distress.

Director Richard Jones tackles this formidable balancing act with verve, drawing ensemble work of magnificent assurance from his cast and production team. Stewart Laing’s sparse, supple designs beautifully suggest the inhuman context of Yank’s tragedy. Mimi Jordan Sherin’s bravura lighting makes the audience flinch in sympathy with O’Neill’s characters, while Aletta Collins’s sharp-edged choreography, set to Sarah Angliss’s disturbing fractal soundscape, eloquently conveys a sense of brutal disjunction.
 

Credit: Alastair Muir

Jones’s direction steers a precisely calibrated course between O’Neill’s broad vision of a society dehumanized by the caesura between rich and poor, and his characters’ individual tragedies. The cast portrays the stokehold and the heartless socialites of Fifth Avenue, emerging smugly sanctimonious from Sunday morning church service, with captivating conviction.

Sheehy offers a fierce account of Mildred’s implacable egotism, disastrously mitigated by ado-gooding instinct that proves fatal to Yank’s sense of self, while Bertie Carvel gives moving expression to Yank’s rage and vulnerability, growing steadily in stature with every new assault of misfortune, violence and frustration. With a slight vocal shift from volume to projection, his admirable performance might become a great one.