Jessica Lange at first seems surprising casting as Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's great family drama. Lange has a feisty, resilient quality whereas one thinks of Mary as a pathetic victim of morphine and her husband's miserliness. But one of the surprises in Robin Phillips's excellent revisionist production is to show Mary to be as much emotional vampire as helpless addict.
O'Neill's play was famously written "in tears and blood". Set in a gaunt New England house in 1912, it offers a thinly disguised portrait of the author's own family. James Tyrone is a penny-pinching actor who wasted his precious talent on a profit-making potboiler. His wife, Mary, became drug-dependent after the traumatic birth of her youngest son, Edmund, who is now an aspiring, consumptive poet. And Edmund's brother Jamie is a cynical wastrel visibly contemptuous of his skinflint father and hophead mother.
One tends to see the play as a painful study of a family bound together by guilt, recrimination and resentment, and to some extent it is. But Phillips's beautifully sensitive production makes us see it from a fresh angle. He reminds us O'Neill is dealing with the two great themes of modern drama: the stranglehold of the past over the present and the battle between truth and illusion. But he also suggests the moral blame for the family's misery stems as much from the mother as the father.
Lange, in a magnificently unsentimental performance, reminds us that Mary is a woman who constantly twists the knife in the family's wounds. You can argue that her addiction is to blame; and Lange captures astonishingly Mary's transition during the day from nervous, hankie-twisting tension to dreamy narcotic escape. But, without judging the character, Lange shows it is her endless picking at the familial scabs that is the real source of agony.
Correspondingly, Charles Dance suggests that James Tyrone's parsimony stems from childhood poverty and his Dickensian sweatshop experience, and he brings out superbly the man's muted despair and quiet love.
Even if Paul Rudd as the self-loathing Jamie and Paul Nicholls as the sensitive Edmund offer more familiar performances, you have the exhilarating experience of rediscovering the great American dramatic classic. You go in expecting an endurance-test; you emerge as if having seen O'Neill's play for the first time.
Until March 3. Box office: 020-7494 5045.
