Compared with the spunky “Elf: The Musical,” there are directorial flourishes of a grittier kind over at the Old Vic, in Richard Jones’s superb production of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Hairy Ape” (1922).Yank (Bertie Carvel) is a hard-boiled stoker on board a grand ocean liner. When a wealthy passenger calls him “a beast” he tries – through a series of heightened, expressionistic encounters with socialists, flappers, agitators, and the like - to come to understand his life better. It doesn’t end well.The play is a long, drawn-out rant. Sock-puppet Yank is a flailing, railing mouthpiece for the playwright’s ideas about the dehumanisation of industrial capitalism. Fans of O’Neill, of whom I am not one, might like it.So it’s all the more extraordinary that Jones creates a dazzling, unsettling production of great dramatic clarity. The world of the stoke-hold is staged as a fiery and demonic ballet. Elsewhere, strange yellow cages hem Yank in at every turn. The face of a capitalist millionaire, often mentioned in the text, floats like a benign heavenly body over the final scenes. It looks striking, beautiful, strange. (Designs Stewart Laing).Bertie Carvel gives a performance of extraordinarily brutal physicality as the anti-hero, and is matched by an excellent, and well-choreographed, ensemble.“The play’s the thing”, so they say. Not here: it’s the production.www.oldvictheatre.com
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