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In a lobby rattling with the clunk-clunk of trains we peered at Abelard being flagellated by a grinning acolyte, and finally we were greeted by the sight of a castrated Abelard strung from a pig-hook while his groin wept gore. Sounds original. Presentation-wise it is, but the Mills & Boon script is full of high Victorian sentence and the acting has too much huff-and-puff. And it’s no fun being badgered and nudged through squelching corridors by look-at-me actors fussing around and being oh-so-terribly-medieval and monkish. A laugh for the performers but to the audience it seems a weird and vengeful prank.
At the National there’s a revival of a flawed and sensational one-act play by Eugene O’Neill. We’re in a tropical African state dominated by a black American usurper, Brutus Jones, who styles himself Emperor. He struts around his golden palace boasting to his chief of staff about how he tricked the ‘bush-niggers’ and plundered their wealth. His position is precarious but he has an escape plan worked out and a stash of loot awaiting him in a safe haven.
A gripping start but then the plot goes haywire. A revolt begins. Jones has just three hours to escape. The revolt accelerates and he must escape right now.
And off he races into the jungle wearing his white naval uniform with gold epaulettes and dancing tassles, presumably for camouflage. He immediately loses his way, though earlier he stressed that he knew the terrain intimately. As darkness descends he is haunted by the ghosts of his victims. The story gets stuck here and turns into a series of flashbacks, nightmares and choreographed interludes, like an X-rated pageant. The dances are energetic and spectacular, sure, and the thumping drums certainly jangle the nerves, but so does a road drill sufficiently amplified. A pit. The script promised to be a searching and thorough examination of criminal megalomania but it veers off into flashy claptrap and wastes its prime asset, Jones, who is reduced from a fascinatingly eloquent narcissist to a shrieking loon, a mere noise in the dark.
Paterson Joseph, in the lead, gives a captivating account of high-camp malice. A star turn, nearly worth the ticket price alone but the choppy, truncated script lets him down. This production began life on the fringe, and to justify its presence at the Olivier there are 39 extras (yup, 39, I counted them, there was nothing else to do) who come on stage, mooch about a bit and exit. Costly add-ons like that don’t disguise the play’s narrow range, they underline it.
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