I’ve often quoted a dictum by the German dramatist Hebbel that, “in a good play, everyone is right”. A corollary of that might be that in a bad play, everyone is wrong. That is certainly the case in this forgotten 1922 piece by Eugene O’Neill, here receiving its British premiere.
The play confronts us with two equally dislikable forces. Curtis, the supposed hero, is an anthropologist who, on the eve of a five-year expedition to Asia to discover the origins of mankind, learns that his wife and irreplaceable helpmate, Martha, is pregnant: the news sends him into a hysterical rage about the inconvenience of procreation. Ranged against him are his ultra-conservative Connecticut relatives who, on the flimsiest evidence, conclude that Martha has been impregnated by Curtis’s best friend, Bigelow.
What might have been a sharp satire on the mean-mindedness of small-town life is soured by Curtis’s towering male egotism; and, although the play may have its origins in O’Neill’s own doubts about parenthood, it substitutes emotion for thought and resolves the situation through a mix of melodrama and sentimentality.
Anthony Biggs directs with total conviction, Tim Dann’s design reflects the play’s Darwinian background, Adam Jackson-Smith’s Curtis has the right vehemence and Charlotte Asprey’s Martha is full of wistful maternal longings. But it is significant that the two best performances are from Alan Turkington as Bigelow, a reformed Don Juan, and Rebecca Lee as the independent-minded Lily, who has decided to forgo marriage and motherhood. They are the sanest characters in a play where almost everyone else is driven by rage, rancour or bourgeois pettiness.
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At Jermyn Street theatre, London, until 31 October. Box office: 020-7287 2875.
