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(IN THIS
ISSUE)
REVIEWS OF O'NEILL PLAYS IN PERFORMANCE
1. A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN, directed by David Leveaux.
Riverside Studios, London, June - July, 1983. (Later moved to the
Mermaid Theatre for a run through November.)
Frances de la Tour, a tall, gawky woman who has generally been stuck
with comic roles, proved again (for those who didn't already know)
what a powerful and sensitive serious actress she is by turning
herself into O'Neill's earth mother Josie for what was, amazingly, the
first London production of A Moon for the Misbegotten. Josie's
gruffness and bawdy humor are relatively easy to play, and within the
range of many actresses; where de la Tour broke new ground was in
letting us see, long before the character wanted to admit it, how
vulnerable and desperately in love--or, rather, how desperately in
need to be allowed to love--she was. Her natural nasality and the
drawn-out vowels in her dialect were made a part of the character,
giving every speech a sound of longing that was neither sigh nor whine
but hinted at both. Even in the strikingly comic squabbling with her
father (Alan Devlin) that dominates the first act there were hints of
the pain and the sacrifice to come; the sight of her tensely awaiting
Tyrone's arrival for their date was a tableau of intense pathos; and
in the poetry of the night and the morning after, she made us believe
and share her brief fantasy of love and her quiet triumph in being
strong enough to carry on when hope was gone. Only two things kept
this performance from truly mythic stature: minor problems with an
accent that came and went; and the difficulty of playing in an
emotional vacuum, for this deep and sensitive Josie was virtually
checkmated by the shallow and empty Jim Tyrone of Ian Bannen.
Bannen, who has played all the Jason Robards roles in England, was
allowed by director David Leveaux to take the references to Tyrone's
spiritual deadness too literally. He played him as a sleepwalker or
zombie, talking as if from great distance in a flat voice, a beat
behind in all his reactions, frequently shaking himself or rubbing his
eyes as if trying to wake up, just as frequently retreating into
glassy-eyed catatonia. Aside from giving de la Tour virtually nothing
to play against and thus making her accomplishment all the more
remarkable, this strange (but clearly
deliberate) performance was deadeningly alienating. We never got
inside this automaton and thus never felt his anguish, his
self-disgust (Robards' strong point) or, ultimately, his relief. And
if the night's sleep in Josie's lap is not a precious respite from
Tyrone's pain, then there is no might-have-been, no sense of Josie's
great sacrifice of undemanding love. Frances de la Tour showed us a
Josie who accepted the impossibility of her fantasy with heroic
dignity; one wished she had been allowed to show us her satisfaction
in having made that acceptance a gift to the man she loved.
--Gerald M. Berkowitz
[P.S. The London production, cast intact, will cross the Atlantic and
join the winter season of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge,
MA, in rotation with other ART productions from late December through
February 4, 1984. A review of its American manifestation will appear
in the next issue of the Newsletter. --Ed.]
(IN THIS ISSUE)
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