Desire Under the Elms
Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin
★ ★ ★ ★
No matter how many people suffer in Greek
tragedy, we can usually decide on a single tragic hero: Oedipus, blind
and raging; Phaedra undone by her own hand; Medea avenged and inhuman.
But
who is the tragic figure in Eugene O’Neill’s play, indebted to the
ancients, from 1926? Is it Eben (the assured Fionn Walton), youngest son
of a New England farmer’s second marriage, who will do anything to
reclaim a property he believes is his? Or his easily duped brothers,
Simeon and Peter, paid off to forsake their inheritance when gold rush
in “Californ-i-yay” looks more promising? Or is it their father Ephraim
(Lalor Roddy), a vain, embittered coot, who combines his narcissism with
Old Testament severity?
Perhaps the answer is
best expressed by Janet Moran’s bright-eyed Abbie, the 35-year-old wife
whom Ephraim brings home one day, who becomes queen of all she surveys:
“It’s purty! I can’t b’lieve it’s r’ally mine.” You hear that last word
repeated throughout O’Neill’s play, a study in venality, property and
sexuality, which is really the tragedy of the possessive pronoun: Oh,
my.
Taking possession of O’Neill’s play is no
easier task. Set in 1850 and written with stifling details of imagery
and voice, where elm trees hang over this motherless space with “a
sinister maternity” and characters speak in hermetically-sealed
phonetics (“Ye’re aimin’ t’ swaller up everythin’ an’ make it your’n,”
Eben tells Abbie, who intends to swaller him with a sinister maternity).
Sophocles wrote indifferent to Freud’s opinion but O’Neill writes in
the shadow of both, leaving little to the imagination and less to
interpretation.
Corn Exchange’s solution is artful, austerely beautiful and appropriately severe. Director Annie Ryan
strips everything back: now, there are no trees, just stripped slats of
wood on a barren terrain; as clear a statement on the enduring worth of
property as you will encounter. Maree Kearns’s set makes no distinction
between interior or exterior spaces at all. An abstract painted grey
horizon reflects Sinead Wallace’s beautiful lights in golden dawns and
fateful twilights and, pointedly, no character ever seems quite at home.
The boldest conceit is in voice, early established by almost unrecognisable Luke Griffin and Peter Coonan
as the gawping brothers, with strong Ulster accents. This seems less
like a political comment than a dramaturgical fix: bringing them
unfussily closer to home.
The tragedy itself
remains dirt simple, achieved with perfunctory shifts in character and
plot. But Ryan manoeuvres through it, against Mel Mercier’s guiding
music, with a supple sense of physicality: Coonan and Griffin retreat
from Fionn Walton’s contract as though it were a dangerous animal, Janet Moran
stretches out in insolent seduction, and Lalor Roddy skitters around in
both merriment and aggression. These are striking new motions through
age-old patterns, the embodiment of human will contorted by fate.
Most
resonantly, it creates a startling meditation on inheritance, the
possessions and histories, needs and disorders, that are handed down
generational lines. In that endless cycle of hope and despair, desires
still seem eternally new, just as tragedy exposes its much deeper roots.
Ends October 13
Peter Crawley
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