Hughie dir. by Eric Fraisher Hayes, Eugene O'Neill (review)

In a letter of June 19, 1942, Eugene O'Neill wrote to George Jean Nathan that the one-act play he had completed earlier that year, Hughie, was part of a projected series "written more to be read than staged" ( Selected Letters, ed. Bogard and Bryer [1988], 531). Indeed, it was not until 1958 that the play finally found its way on to a stage (in Swedish); and it would be 1963 before Hughiereceived its English premiere with Burgess Meredith, followed by a Broadway opening the following year in the José Quintero production starring Jason Robards Jr. Hughie's challenge lies in that it is effectively an experiment in contrasting ways of developing theatrical character. The play's only two onstage characters (more of which in a moment) meet in a run-down New York hotel late one night in 1928: Erie Smith and Charlie Hughes. Erie Smith (played in this performance by Aaron Murphy) is "a small-fry gambler and horse-player, living hand-to-mouth on the fringe of the rackets"; he is all exteriority, a character who talks endlessly in ways that reveal a minimally self-reflexive interior life. By contrast, Charlie Hughes (Dorian Lockett), a terminally bored hotel night clerk, says and does almost nothing; he is all interiority. As readers, we only know what he is thinking because O'Neill provides him with an active life of the mind by way of a running didascalic commentary. As Smith volubly spins the myth of his life, Hughes carries on a sporadic inner dialogue that bounces from speculations sparked by the sound of a passing fire engine ("will it be big enough … to burn down the whole damn city?") or clanging garbage cans ("I'd wake up the whole damn city!"), to eventual interest in his garrulous and apparently insomniac guest's potential links to the mob.

As part of the Eugene O'Neill International Festival of Theatre, which has staged productions of O'Neill's work both in Danville, California, and in O'Neill's ancestral home of New Ross, County Wexford, director Eric Fraisher Hayes has tackled this conundrum of play. Working with dramaturg William Davies King, Hayes attempts a simple expedient to rebalance these two modes of characterization in a stage production: he introduces a third character, a narrator (Clive Worsley) who delivers the stage directions (including Hughes's thoughts) as a counterpoint to Erie's monologue. As a way of making an otherwise potentially puzzling play comprehensible to an audience, the device is simple and effective. It is a shame, however, that the director and cast did not trust it more fully. Having absolved Lockett's Hughes of the need to project what he is thinking, Hayes leaves one to wonder how far he could have pushed his performance in the direction of stillness. What, for example, would a great Beckett actor have done with a role in which all of the character's thoughts are narrated? Hayes's decision to allow Lockett himself to deliver some of the lines that pass through his mind in the stage directions further unsettles the play's delicate balance between unknowable interiority and unknowing exteriority. This is not to say that Lockett's performance does not work; however, Hayes might have trusted him to do less.

Murphy, on the other hand, throws himself energetically into the febrile, self-deluding Erie, while Worsley's Narrator gives the play a propulsive narrative energy. Worsley manages to establish his character both as part, and not part, of the world of the play, although he might have been helped a bit more by the lighting design. For instance, at one point he appears downstage in a spotlit pool of light (always a handy way of signalling to an audience that a character occupies a reality separate from the stage world around them); however, this lighting cue is not used with any consistency. Likewise, one wonders about the...