Things have changed at The Old Vic. The freshly painted foyer with its pink neon sign Dare, Always Dare illuminating the entrance, screams new life. Matthew Warchus’ inaugural season as newly appointed artistic director shouts diversity, inclusiveness and innovation. Glass is excited to see all the upcoming productions – but it is with Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape that we begin.
The Hairy Ape is described as work of theatrical Expressionism. It sounds tricky to direct theatre within an over-arching artistic movement, and O’Neill was a stickler. He wrote phonetically and stated that set designs for the play “must be in the expressionist method”. Yet Richard Jones’ intelligent direction creates a play that is both faithful to O’Neill’s dictum and exciting and new.
Cast in The Hairy Ape. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
The action opens in the engine room of an ocean liner. Oil-smeared and heat-hazed, Yank (Bertie Carvel) and his crew seem mostly content shoveling coal into furnace. He “belongs” as he keeps telling us in a thick New York drawl. Not swayed by Paddy the Irishman’s (Steffan Rhodri) lyrical reminiscences, he is firm that their work is integral to the success of the ship.
Then he is visited by Mildred Douglas (Rosie Sheehy), the grand-daughter of the ship’s owner. She descends into the ships bowels – white dress wafting – where, like a wayward angel, she proclaims Yank “a filthy beast” before wilting into the arms of an officer who shepherds her back to the security of the upper decks.
Bertie Carvel (Yank) in The Hairy Ape. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
The insult lodges in Yank’s gut, planting the seeds of discontent. He vows to take revenge on the girl and all of her kind. No longer content with the life of a labourer, his quest takes him to New York, to a workers’ collective and, finally, onto the city zoo where having broken into the cage of an ape, he is destroyed by the animal he claims to share kinship with.
Bertie Carvel (Yank) in The Hairy Ape. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
Stewart Laing’s design frames the action cleverly. A vast metal bunker, yellow and garish, is the engine room. Yank swings from one bar to the next, his expansive energy and movement proleptic of the ape he believes he becomes.
Later, the metal frame becomes a Fifth Avenue shop window, where Yank stares at an unobtainable monkey fur coat, and finally it becomes the cage where he will meet his untimely death.
Ensemble in The Hairy Ape. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
The backstage area is exposed, the audience glimpsing the bones of the theatre rarely seen, the fourth wall unconstructed, highlighting the artifice of the power-class-money matrix that Yank struggles unsuccessfully against.
Bertie Carvel (Yank) in The Hairy Ape. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
Later, a glowing helium balloon wafts onto stage, picturing the giant face of Douglas Steel contorted by the balloon’s shape – a symbol of the omnipresent and elusive quality of capitalist power, hovering above Yank’s obscurity.
Bertie Carvel (Yank) in The Hairy Ape. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
Through all of this is Yank. Base, lean, powerful and powerless, his physicality as unstoppable as is his inevitable demise. Clutching the Ape, his back literally broken, Carvel’s stunning transformation into an American anti-hero is flawless.
It is hard to believe this is the same actor who portrayed the witty, urbane, magician Jonathan Strange, is his portrayal of the BBC’s visually beautiful and brilliant adaption of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell earlier this year.
Bertie Carvel (Yank) and cast in The Hairy Ape. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
The Hairy Ape is a waking dream that stays in the head– acid bright. There is a moment where both Mildred and Yank lean on the original column of the theatre and pick away at a piece of loose plaster – a reminder of the fallibility of social constructs or perhaps the slow crumbling of a civilization. Who knows? Now in its last week go Ape and grab a ticket while you can.
by Gabriella Crewe-Read
The Hairy Ape is at The Old Vic, The Cut, London, SE1 8NB until Saturday Nov 21
Tel: 08448717628