Strange Interlude directed by Simon Godwin (review)

It is hard to say whether Eugene O’Neill would have sanctioned the National Theatre’s truncated production of Strange Interlude—pruned down to just three and a half hours—standing bravely in the shadow of the epic, five-hour-long original. In writing Strange Interlude, O’Neill made theater history by inventing the dramatic equivalent of fiction’s interior monologues and earned his third Pulitzer Prize. His nine-act masterpiece, produced by the Theatre Guild in 1928, was so long that it required a dinner break in addition to the regular intervals. O’Neill was well aware of the difficulties in staging this monumental work, and he resisted Lawrence Langner’s impulse to cut it, though he did eventually hack away about forty pages. The play’s unusual length—described by the Evening Journal’s theater critic in 1928 as a “nine-act dramatic marathon” of “sprawling size” and by Robert Brustein in 1963 as nine acts of “blah-blah-blah”—has proven exhausting for modern audiences and remains an obstacle to its production. Complete productions of Strange Interludeare rarely found in modern theater repertoires, where the trend has been to downsize casts, sets, and running times (case in point is Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company’s 2012 staging that had a running time of three hours and forty-five minutes). One notable exception was the six-hour Neo-Futurist production (part of the 2009 Goodman Theatre’s retrospective on O’Neill, which I reviewed in the Eugene O’Neill Reviewin 2009). Their irreverently deconstructive approach demonstrated that an experimental treatment of Strange Interludecould sustain the entire text—and may indeed be the best way of approaching O’Neill’s once-experimental play. Its success left me wondering whether a “straight” production of Strange Interludecould succeed on twenty-first-century stages and curious as to what London’s National Theatre might do with it.

West End audiences have seen Strange Interludejust twice: the Theatre Guild’s touring production in 1931 and one starring Glenda Jackson and Edward Petherbridge in 1984. Both of these productions stayed true to O’Neill’s original intentions. I went to the National Theatre expecting a long evening, given that the curtain time had been bumped back to 6:30 p.m. for press night. Imagine my surprise when the program listed three and a half hours hours as the running time. How on earth would director Simon Godwin trim nearly a third of O’Neill’s script? Would it destroy the drama’s elegance, eliminating the repetitions and interior monologues that O’Neill insisted were crucial to its architecture?

On one level, the National Theatre trimmed the play with success, and this leaner version can be viewed as a blueprint for future companies wishing to stage Strange Interludein a more manageable format. Ye t on the other hand, if Godwin’s production benefited from its new slender form, it struggled with two central challenges of the play: staging its famous asides and dealing with its dated attitudes toward women. In Strange Interlude, O’Neill pioneered the scripting of characters’ inner emotions. Rooted in Freudian and Jungian theory, these interior monologues—made distinct from other dialogue by fragmentary thoughts separated by frequent ellipses— repeatedly interrupt the drama’s conventional action to reveal characters’ inner thoughts. Like Shakespearean asides but with a modern twist, they present a serious performance challenge. In the original 1928 production, director Philip Moeller devised a new performance technique for these moments by freezing the action while characters delivered asides directly to the audience in an altered voice. Some critics called this approach mechanistic, erratic, and even ridiculous. It was met at times with nervous laughter from audiences, but O’Neill was dead-set against playing Strange Interludefor laughs. Yet like many innovations, it became the style to mimic if not parody, and it was famously burlesqued by Groucho Marx.

At the National, Godwin took a different approach. Rather than freezing the action during asides...