“They [critics] should always be ignored, because all they ever do is interfere with the personality of the author and the independence of the reader”
Anton Chekov

By Eugene O’Neill. With Charles Dance, Jessica Lange, Paul Rudd, Paul Nicholls and Olivia Coleman
Lyric Theatre, Shaftsbury Avenue, London
Monday—Saturday: 7.15pm; Saturday Matinee: 2.30pm

Among the musical Napoleons, singing footballers, Hollywood stars and ex-supermodels discovering a salaried alternative to doing lunch, a masterpiece of western theatre has landed in the theatrical Reeperbahn of Shaftsbury Avenue.

In Eugene O’Neill’s Long day’s journey into night, fear and the Celtic compulsion for conflict and destruction have withered the capacity to experience life well. The play is heavy with a sense of loss before anything has ever been gained. In a wonderful moment, the pathologically parsimonious James Tyrone, temporarily lulls his tirades against his sons, and gives consumptive Edmund ten dollars for his fifty cents cab fare to the doctor’s, an act of uncharacteristic generosity dragged up from a deep, neglected wound in a man capable only of a combative approach to life. Like many living on the edge of panic, Tyrone is a man of powerful feelings who can express only the negative ones. All the things he knows he should say and do but incomprehensibly cannot, are in that ten buck note. We recognise the family habits hung out for us to identify; the things we can only approach crab-wise.

It takes the diagnosis of consumption in Edmund to shake Tyrone into opening up about the source of his meanness — financial and emotional — and for a fleeting moment, father and son get close, then the bell goes, and another round of family love and support bloodies its way towards night. O’Neill makes Tarantino look like a puff ball.

I saw this production in preview. Previews are very much work-in-progress; faults are ironed out, things that cannot be visualised in rehearsal discovered in front of an audience, but preview or no, this is the rare, mainlining buzz of real theatre. Perhaps by press-night Charles Dance will have ironed out the join in his wig, the only join in a performance which, to use the cliché, is utterly seamless. He inhabits Tyrone and in doing so allows O’Neill to breathe through to us; it is a performance without ego which perfectly expresses a character dominated by ego. Such is the paradox of the best acting; a simple, truthful line on the text and Tyrone’s whole life and background, with wonderful clarity, shading and power, seem to rise up in front of us like Proust’s stage set. Dance made me forget Olivier till he stretched up to switch on the lights and I wondered if he would emulate the old attention-grabber’s breath-stopping, balancing act on the edge of the table, but Dance, quite correctly, used a chair. Chicken.

In the first act, Miss Lange contaminates her acting with tiny gestures underlining clauses — running her hands over the backs of chair, straightening a table-cloth, folding a handkerchief. Actor’s tricks: move-speak-pause-move-speak. It truncates the lines into textual sausage links which lose meaning. I began to stop listening and was content to watch her float in a magic lantern sequence of pre-Raphaelite, Chekovian, Ibsenesque poses, staring out of windows dreaming of Catholicism and morphine, but in the second act she was cooking with fluency and sucked us into the addicted nightmare of Mary Tyrone and not the acting technique of Miss Jessica Lange. She is a strong actress and this strength sometimes is at odds with the Mary Tyrone who is a scared little Catholic rabbit overwhelmed by the world of a matinée idol, now swimming away from it with saints and babies in limbo, on a sea of morphine. But Lange uses it beautifully; there is an epic sense of disintegration in her, she is the centre of the family terror. She and Dance are formidable heavyweights, comfortable in the O’Neill division. But the boys...

Dance and Lange have a sense of period, as does Olivia Colman as Cathleen the maid, who brings 19th century emigrant Ireland onto the stage with her. Paul Rudd and Nicholls as the sons, are modern Hollywood, dropping in from the set of Clueless or Friends for a bit of classical. Neither has a through line; they play moments; emote a bit, act drunk, cough and if in doubt, shout. Their period gesture is sub De Niro hand-jive acting (The only Americans who hand-jive while speaking are American actors). I recall the moment in the Olivier production when Edmund punched James jr. We stiffened and felt that rise in the hairs on the neck when a real fight breaks out among us. In this production it was pure camp. These are difficult parts for young actors, and they both obviously have ability, but neither seems to have realised how much help O’Neill offers. Like diners in a great restaurant settling for omelette and chips, they orbit around O’Neill’s emotional veracity and dramatic honesty, doing their own acting thing, all effect and little cause. But the play still powers through.

Simon Higlett’s set and Paul Pyant’s lighting elegantly capture the play’s east coast evanescence of sun, fog, darkness and loss. Characters become deathly as they exit behind diaphanous walls and eventually Mary, the house and the fog seem to dissolve into a ghostly, demented soup of Celtic self destruction.

The distinction of O’Neill’s greatness is that everything is so real we feel we know this family, where they’ve come from, where they’re headed, sense lives in their entireties, and dread the Tyrones’ future. Yes, we know Edmund is a variant of Eugene himself, his illness the family illness made physical, from which he was able to fashion the great play we are watching — conception and realisation in front of us in a great circle of the creative dark arts — however O’Neill survived consumption, to be consumed by greatness and sadly, alcoholism with its symptomatic depressions; ‘illness’ never left him. James Junior will wash up a drunken wreck somewhere: Mary is already one of the living dead and James Senior will be left alone, hunched over his second rate property deals, exercising his fear of returning to the destitution from which he came and from which his whole life has been a flight. In his speech about loving Shakespeare and how he spurned the Bard for money, Dance movingly expresses O’Neill’s awareness how fear deflects us from the things that have real value and that one of life’s tragedies is the common failure to understand what is good for us: humanity’s infinite capacity to view lemmings as role models and not warnings. The solutions the Tyrones seek are merely other parts of the problem.

Director Robin Phillips lets O’Neill get to us easily, and despite minor cavils, this production is a luminous oasis of dignity, adulthood and excellence among the tarts of Shaftsbury Avenue. God bless Bill Kenwright. May Everton finish in the upper half of the Premiership. Just.

By Jonathan Hall. With Ian Curtis (Richard), Mike Grady (Phil), Ian Reddington (Mark), Fred Pearson (Cliff), Francis Lee (Gavin). Director: Mike Bradwell.
Bush Theatre, Shepherd's Bush. Box Office 020 7610 4224 e-mail info@bushtheatre.co.uk and web site www.bushtheatre.co.uk
Until 14th April (possible 1-week extension)

In the programme notes to his play, Jonathan Hall suggests that gays have a choice of lifestyles denied to heteros and that the gay man should make choices which are right for him. Would that we could all do that — gay, straight or convertible. Unfortunately, life often seems to be about being unable to make the choices that are good for us and, of course, drama focuses on those who come up with the wrong hunch. What use would Hamlet be if he said "Sod! It’s about time I got over this. Let it go, son. Go kiss your mother." We are often prisoners of our own nature, and breaking out to reach real freedom of choice is a problem which, as Larkin has it, "Brings the priest and the doctor/In their long coats/Running over the fields." Freedom of choice is sometimes the most difficult thing in the world to achieve.

There’s a void in each of the characters in ‘Flamingos’ which the lover’s chase or the avoidance of it attempts to fill or ignore. Richard’s relationship with his offstage partner, is the ‘straight gay’ one — long-term, faithful, like a ‘straight’ marriage in the household of Mr and Mrs Normal (floating voter, 2.4 children, favourite programme ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’) Mark loves older, anoraky geography teacher and weather addict Phil, but likes to have a bit on the side. Theirs is the ‘open’ relationship. But Phil doesn’t love Mark. He loves his brother-in-law but never found the courage to commit, so has emotionally shut down and settles for companionship, uncontaminated by love. Cliff, too, had a long, straightish-style relationship with the now-dead Dean. Their success, he confesses, was that they never loved each other. And then there’s Gavin, screwing around in the hope that he might find someone who gives him the respect he cannot give himself.

So the archetypes gather at Cliff’s Cliffdean Hotel in Blackpool for a gay week-end under the illuminations. Flamingos is the local gay club: four floors of mating season and stripper. Richard, the uptight Bond fan (the unfashionable Lazenby, in particular, who once gave him an autograph on the Isle of Man) unimaginably uptight, straight gay man from BHS (quote Gavin) catalyses everyone and, in turn, finds a release into infidelity. What we have is a revolving version of Pasolini’s ‘Theorem’ with full English breakfast and Ian Curtis playing the Terence Stamp role in a Barbour.

The various forms of relationships are deconstructed over the weekend: Richard triggers an echo of the passion and love Phil once felt for his brother-in-law and propels him to a point of departure; a private lunch date which may take Phil off in a new emotional direction, but Richard leaves and Phil is stuck with his currently unsatisfactory relationship, leavened by the Shipping News. Mark seduces Richard and, unloved by the man he loves (Phil) and then rejected by Richard, his loneliness is revealed. Mark is only the second man Richard has slept with. Richard unwittingly stirs the hornet’s nest then scarpers back early to his long-term lover.

Flamingos is pleasant, well done and entertaining. There is nothing startling or revelatory in it, simply a graze over the fragility of relationships and the ever-pressing presence of loneliness that shadows us all. Because its about homosexuals, it lacks the traditional bitterness and genetic hatred of plays about the poison of heterosexual relationship failures. Gays seem to be a bit more civilised, but that may be my naivety. You like everyone onstage — they’re all decent people, ordinary people, with no particular gifts, coping with life as best they can. And that is what is so attractive about Flamingos. It’s a play which likes people and sees everyone struggling against powerful components of the ordinariness and banality of everyday living. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation", quoth Henry David Thoreau, and onstage we have a handful of men revealing that quiet desperation, little layer by little layer, glimpses of a potential happiness — occasional sunny periods, as Phil might say, but clouding over again. When they all go back to work on Monday, it will be back to ‘normal’ — smile for the customer or the school pupils.

The cast has deservedly been praised uniformly. Just to be different, I would like to give particular mention to Mike Grady as the weather-obsessed, closed-down geography teacher Phil, whose cloudy cover is temporarily broken by Richard. Due to the witlessness of casting directors, Grady has spent a lifetime condemned to supporting roles in TV comedies, and it is nice to see Mike Bradwell giving him the opportunity to show us what a fine, truthful dramatic actor he is.

By Hugh Whitemore. With Derek Jacobi, Francesca Hunt, Margot Leicester, Richard O’Callaghan, David Yelland. Director: Anthony Page. Designer: John Gunter
Vaudeville Theatre, The Strand, Monday—Saturday at 8.00pm, Wednesday and Saturday matinees at 3pm.

I look forward to a Hugh Whitemore play. They usually receive grudging acknowledgement from critics, who would rather be dead than be seen without a hip finger on the hip pulse. Mr Whitemore has the courage to fly in the face of hip. "Well-constructed", "Old-fashioned", "Well-written" are the barbed compliments which have withered their way to him from cool hacks in Diesel jeans. All nonsense of course; as the Grand Old Queen himself put it, "Books are well written or badly written" and so are plays. ‘Breaking the Code’, ‘A Letter of Resignation’, ‘Disposing of the Body’ are plays which have dealt — in their old-fashioned, well-constructed, well-written way — in the playwright’s eternal obsession with what lies beneath the glassy surface gradually isolating the individual from friends, society and, finally, himself. Or herself.

‘God Only Knows’ is sort of well-written and well-constructed. Ish. In parts. It lurches between the kind of theatre which has given us ‘Dial M For Murder’ and an albeit, more liquidly elegant, David Hare theatre of lecture. It seems to have been dashed off. Rather like Derek Jacobi’s performance. Set in Blair’s Toscana, a habitual holiday between middle-aged, bourgeois friends (one with young, voluptuous second wife) is interrupted by an antiChrist who, as if by a black miracle, crashes his car against one of their trees.

Enter Mr Jacobi in pyjamas at twelve thousand revs, boiling with panic and information that could shake the foundations of western civilisation, hotly pursued by agents of the Vatican. Mr Jacobi has been approached in his position as archivist at the Vatican, by a collector wishing authentication of a first century Roman’s letter which suggests that not all is as we were taught round our Sunday School mangers. The Easter Egg is but a cynical, commercial invention. Or along those lines — I’m not saying what the letter discusses: that would be a churlish give-away — but I ask myself, does the letter central to the play’s justification, actually exists somewhere? Mr Whitemore strikes one as a man of integrity, so my suspicion is that this document probably does exist. In which case, Mr Whitemore has opened up a right can of worms which should be discussed openly (and probably never will be). If the letter does not exist, then there seems no possible justification for this play; it simply reduces to an end-of-the-pier piece of Agatha Christie.

In the second Act Mr Jacobi launches into a fortissimo, pizzicato attack on Christianity (and Catholicism in particular), buttressing his arguments with interesting historical facts that contradict the veracity of the Gospels: such as the fact that big, bad, Herod died four years before baby Jesus was born, so the slaughter of the innocents is simply a gospel writer using dramatic licence to beef up the plot. All very interesting, but is the bleedin’ letter true? That’s the question one takes out into the sopping Strand at the end of the evening. Is it lying in Vatican vaults protected by laser alarms and thousand-volt defence systems? Are jewelled Cardinal fingers dialling dodgy blokes in Sicily about some upstart English playwright blowing the gaff on the longest-running show in history: the evergreen, foot-tapping, whistle the songs, people’s favourite, Life of Our Redeemer? Is Heaven simply an early advertising promise? I suppose we shall only know the truth if Mr Whitemore’s body is found hanging from Blackfriar’s Bridge one morning.

This is not a show that will go down well in Dublin. I saw it with a couple of American Christians whom I fully expected to be offended by Jacobi’s relentless tirade that religion concerns itself less with the spirit than with the discipline of keeping us in our places. But they thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Perhaps that’s all they believe religion should be. As for me (and many others), Jacobi was preaching to the converted, coming to conclusions that we had reached shortly after getting out of short trousers.

The balancing arguments — that religion is important, that mystery is crucial to a sense of human emotional health — are correctly presented thinly. None of the vacationers Jacobi has burst in on are the types who think deeply about such things. There is one important line which Jacobi makes so inconspicuously from the back of the set that it is almost lost. Margot Leicester’s character declares that if you remove God you remove the spiritual from life. Jacobi contradicts this, muttering that he isn’t saying man is not spiritual. It’s gone in a second. If God exists man is a spiritual creature. If God does not exist man is a spiritual creature. Isn’t this what Jung was paddling in? Whitemore’s observation that religions created by man’s spiritual or chiliastic nature, ultimately corrupt into nothing more than political movements obsessed with power is well... stating the bleedin’ obvious again and hardly worth £32.50 ticket price and fifty pence an item cloakroom charge to hear. And this is the problem with the play. Written fifty years ago, it would have had tremendous impact: outrage, Bishops on telly, letters from Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. As it is, it’s a pleasant night in the theatre with strong overtones of panelled walls and Cluedo. Old-fashioned West End with a hint of steel. A bowl of cornflakes by Jamie Oliver. If an American producer sees this, he will no doubt grasp that the basic premise of a document incurring the wrath of the Vatican and George Bush, would make a great movie. Probably with Kevin Costner in the Jacobi role. A Letter of Resurrection. Priests, mafiosi and the CIA fighting the good fight to keep the free world locked in conformity. Also starring Jennifer Lopez.

But if Whitemore is revealing something true, then this is not a bowl of cornflakes but a dangerous meal.

The cast is wonderful, but I have some problems with Mr Jacobi’s high-octane style, which is at odds with the naturalness of the others. Stillness has never been Mr Jacobi’s thing and it might be inappropriate here, he is after all playing a man in cosmic terror for his life. But he has alarming epileptic moments of energy where he becomes subject to uncontrollable outbursts of acting.