Sometimes the more strange, the more realistic. Arthur Miller, Chekhov, Tennessee Williams have all been irradiated recently on the stage of the Young Vic. Non-naturalistic productions have illuminated psychological truth. Now it is the turn of Eugene O’Neill. The result is both haunting and bloated.
Ah, Wilderness! is a short, bright 1933 prequel to the mighty Long Day’s Journey Into Night. O’Neill said that the idea for the play came to him in a dream. It was, he said, “a wishing”, an idealised version of his Connecticut childhood. Long Day’s Journey is a slow-burning story of concealment and lies and decline. Ah, Wilderness! (the title comes from the Persian poems The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam) is a small coming-of-age story, a sprint into light. It features not drug addiction and mournfulness but drunks and braggadocio. It deals not in secrets but in bare statements and instruction.
In Natalie Abrahami’s startling production, an O’Neill lookalike prowls around the action as if he’d been sent by Ofsted. Dick Bird’s design perches the action on huge sand dunes – perhaps scooped from the recent production of Happy Days. This may suggest the sands of time and desert waste, but it requires the actors to spend an awful lot of energy labouring upwards, sinking into the grains.
The play is too modest to live up to this. Yet O’Neill is not, and the evening brings the authentic tang of his unmatchable maritime broodiness. Janie Dee is immaculately poised as the fretful mother. George MacKay – last seen on stage as a limber, insinuating lad in The Cement Garden and recently on screen in Pride – has a lovely lanky intensity, making his poetic spoutings both appealing and absurd. He is on the brink of being a star, and let’s hope also of being a serious stage actor.
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