The Hairy Ape, Old Vic review: Towering Carvel stokes anti-capitalist tale

From the opening moments Richard Jones’s production is bold, combining raw muscularity with a finesse that’s almost balletic, says Henry Hitchings 
Rage against the machine: Bertie Carvel as labourer Yank at the Old Vic
Alastair Muir
Henry Hitchings6 November 2015

Bertie Carvel is immense as the unlikely hero of Eugene O’Neill’s nightmarish play — a prescient Twenties vision of a society hollowed out by capitalism. His character Yank is a brawny misfit, struggling to find meaning in a world that seems to demand conformism, and Carvel makes his moodiness painful, his pride clumsy and his self-discovery explosive.

From the opening moments Richard Jones’s production is bold, combining raw muscularity with a finesse that’s almost balletic. Yank works on a transatlantic liner, toiling in the engine room, and Stewart Laing’s design is both stark and grand. Alongside Yank a team of stamping stokers, caked with grime, rhythmically perform repetitive tasks. Trapped in a steel cage, their only respite comes in the form of beer, and they have to put up with the sour pronouncements of Paddy (Steffan Rhodri), who tells them they’re no better than slaves.

When spoiled young socialite Mildred (Rosie Sheehy) descends into the vessel’s bowels to get a taste of the hard graft that keeps her father’s business empire afloat, she’s appalled by Yank’s filthy appearance. And as she recoils, he is shaken from the belief that he’s an impressive cog in society’s giant machine.

In a series of abrupt scenes he seeks revenge but experiences rejection, prowling around Manhattan and trying to identify a place where he belongs. The people he encounters are soulless or suspicious. Eventually he finds a strange and short-lived solace in the company of a gorilla at the zoo.

All of this is achieved with great visual flair. But there are problems with inaudibility. O’Neill’s experimental use of language doesn’t fully come across, and we’re left instead with some flat characterisation and an excess of weighty symbolism. Still, there’s a vivid relevance in O’Neill’s depiction of the stifling effects of social class’s rigid structures, as well as in his portrait of oppressed workers reduced to the status of zombies.

Until November 21, Old Vic (0844 871 7628)

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