Mourning Becomes Electra, and: The Pillowman (review)

Two writers on the verge of greatness were showcased this past season in clear, intelligent productions at Britain's Royal National Theatre. Through an opportune scheduling twist, audiences were able last winter to witness within hours of one another the epic Mourning Becomes Electrain the Lyttleton by the late Irish American, Eugene O'Neill, and in the Cottesloe The Pillowmanby the very much alive Anglo Irishman, Martin McDonagh. Under the audacious leadership of Nicholas Hytner, the National has quickly become London's most exciting theatre venue, and its serendipitous pairing of these two plays provided a rare opportunity to witness writers two generations apart in the process of discovering their own voices.

The revisionist concept that informed Howard Davies's production of Mourning Becomes Electrais radically simple: treat the play without any reverence, staging it as if O'Neill's later, great plays— The Iceman Cometh,Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten—had never been written. O'Neill won the Nobel Prize in 1936, five short years after the premiere of Mourning Becomes Electra, whose bold strategy of connecting ancient Greek tragedy to post-Civil War America was seen as his finest of many attempts to create serious theatre in the United States. Davies, scene designer Bob Crowley, and an almost uniformly excellent cast have eschewed all of O'Neill's well-documented theatrical quests, however, staging instead a richly visual, fast-moving melodrama that, among many surprises, posthumously showcases a playwright teetering on the verge of greatness, yet still looking for the original, painful, stammering voice that Edmund calls in Long Day's Journey, "the native eloquence of us fog people."

Davies has moved his actors through the three plays that make up Mourning Becomes Electra—"The Homecoming," "The Hunted," and "The Haunted"—with forceful speed that slows down only for such beautifully written speeches as returning Union hero Ezra's disclosure that the war has made him realize too late how much he has wasted his life. Tim Pigott-Smith as Ezra Mannon is a short-lived, although powerful, match for the stunning Helen Mirrin as his adulterous wife, Christine. Mirrin's performance rides the changing moods of O'Neill's script, with the result that her Christine emerges as the most complex and vital character in the play. Neither Mirrin nor the rest of the cast pull back from O'Neill's most melodramatic moments, risking audience guffaws in order to commit to the actions these characters take against one another and in spite of themselves. The center of the trilogy is Lavinia Mannon, here intelligently and boldly played by Eve Best with an increasing sense of doom infecting every discovery she makes about herself. Paul Hilton, as her brother Orin, gives the evening's most satisfactory performance, interpreting this most problematic of O'Neill's characters, not as a psychoanalytic case study, but as a shell-shocked veteran who has lost his ability to try to make sense of the world. The New England locals are led by the dynamic Clarke Peters as Seth, although the effectiveness of O'Neill's intended equivalent of the Greek chorus is undermined by Davies's decision to cast a group diverse in race and in accent, thus creating unnecessary confusion about exactly where the Mannon estate is located. Moreover, the uneven vocal work by Patsy Rodenburg and the bewildering dialect coaching by Joan Washington served to confuse the characters' origins and sounded the only false notes in an otherwise flawless production.

The carefully wrought performances were enhanced by designer Crowley's postmodern environment that, in its forced perspective, seemed to extend endlessly back, past the Civil War and past Aeschylus, pulling the audience into a journey inside the self. Stage left was dominated by the exterior of the Mannon mansion, whose pillars thrust through a faded, battle-scarred American...