I just saw “The Hairy Ape” at the Old Vic tonight. It is an early Eugene O’Neill play. After dragging Judie to several versions of “Long Days Journey Into Night” and “The Iceman Cometh” (and more of his plays), she decided that she could skip this one, so I decided to go while she was in Las Vegas. O’Neill is absolutely my favorite American playwright and perhaps my favorite playwright, period (although Shakespeare is in the conversation). I think “Long Days Journey” is the greatest play ever written by an American, with “Iceman” in the top five, along with the obvious choices from Williams, Albee and Miller. I’d never seen this play, although I recall reading it–probably 40 years ago. It is interesting, rather than memorable. It is based on O’Neill’s experience working on a steamer after he ran away from his family, but before he got consumption. (The character Edmund, who is O’Neill in his autobiographical classic, talks about this in “Long Days Journey”.) It doesn’t have the power or structure of his later master works, but “The Hairy Ape” has moments of poetry and I think you can easily spot the prototype of Larry from “Iceman”.

This performance starred Bertie Carvel, as Yank, who I last saw playing Miss Trunchbowl in “Matilda”. (Quite a different role.) I’m not quite sure what to say about the production, since I think it is a flawed play to begin with, even if it is one that is worth trying. I’m don’t know how you can make it coherent and believable. And I have to admit that I had trouble completely understanding the working class accents of the other laborers in the ship’s boiler room, although I am not sure that it really mattered, since I could understand the main characters. They did some nice choreography and staging of the scenes, although it is my recollection from reading the play so long ago that one of the things that tied things together was the beating of drums and the pounding of the engine of the ship. If that was part of the original script (I haven’t bothered to check my memory), they decided to drop it. The play is about the chasm between the wealthy and the working class and Yank’s (Carvel’s) anger and resentment about it, triggered when a rich socialite insists on going down to the boiler room of the ship to see how the other half lives, takes one look at Yank and is horrified at the hairy ape she sees. Yank’s anger, attempt to get even and his ultimate impotence takes up the rest of the play. There are some ideas that make you think and some good speeches, but the whole thing really doesn’t quite hold together. But it is really quite a political statement and has a real resonance in today’s world of increasing disparity between the super-rich and the middle and lower classes. I suspect this is one of the reasons that they chose to stage it. The play hasn’t opened yet. I’ll be interested in what the critics think.

This whole discussion of class disparity segues very nicely into a follow up on yesterday’s post about the Conservative’s attack on the working class and the utterly surprising and strange action of the House of Lords riding to the rescue of people who I suspect they normally wouldn’t deign to be in the same room with. So what happened today? Osborne and the Conservatives realized that they they were beaten and decided to “tweak” their financial plan. It appears that they will drive the working class into poverty gradually, rather than immediately, which is probably enough to mollify everyone, even though it shouldn’t be. Osborne and the Tories are as furious at the House of Lords as a bunch of tight-ass prep school rich guys can ever get. There is apparently some talk of naming a hundred new Conservative peers to the House of Lords to eliminate all dissent (incredibly, they can do that), but the House of Lords is already very, very large and this does not seem to be the preferred course of action. although you can bet that they will be naming peers with more frequency over the next few years. But they do seem to want revenge, so it seems more likely that they will do something to further decrease the power of the House of Lords, although it is a body that doesn’t seem to do all that much anyway. One the one hand, I’m sympathetic with the idea that a group of unelected rich people should not be able to undo the work of the duly elected government, which theoretically better represents the will of the people. But if you are going to reduce them to a completely impotent arm of government, what is the point of having them at all? Tradition? Something for Paul McCartney to do (or not) when he is town?