Review: THE HAIRY APE, The Old Vic, November 3 2015

The lads are boozing in the bowels of a steamship crossing the Atlantic bemoaning their lot, listening to Paddy (Steffan Rhodri) tell beautiful tales of his days under sail on a clipper in a pre-industrial age. Long (Callum Dixon) recognises that those days are gone and that these stokers are little more than a chain-gang imprisoned by capitalism as effectively as by a jailer. Yank (Bertie Carvel) has no truck with nostalgia nor agitprop and even eschews beer, the better to appreciate the whisky he slugs back.

But when a flighty, foolish heiress (Rosie Sheehy) indulges herself in a bit of misery tourism and recoils in horror at the men's beast-like appearance, caked in coaldust and sweat, stoking the furnaces, something inside Yank snaps and he leaves his cage to explore Manhattan. But what he finds there leads him only to the hairy ape of the silly girl's taunt and a grudging acceptance that she, knowing the system better than he does, was probably right.

The Hairy Ape (continuing at The Old Vic until 21 November) is a powerful tale of alienation in 20th century capitalism with strong echoes of Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, another cri de coeur against the lot doled out to the working man. Given the rise of the isolationist Right in Europe since the recession of 2008, it's timely to consider Eugene O'Neill's short, sharp portrait of a man adrift without a human identity in a world that takes him for granted, ultimately retreating to a cage, the better to see steel bars that can at least be felt, rather than the cruel, but equally effective, invisible bars that lock him out of society.

It's quite hard work at times of course, with Paddy's lyrical evocation of sleeping under sails giving way to much declaiming on the iniquities of capitalism. The staging gives us plenty to look at though - with a banana yellow (natch) colour scheme running through the ship-based scenes offset by the cold grey steel and monochrome of life on deck or in Manhattan, a city of literally faceless people. Bertie Carvel is all alpha-male bristling biceps and barely suppressed rage in a performance that manages to squeeze in some nuance between the six-pack and the square jaw - so there's much to enjoy there too.

Director Richard Jones delivers the whole thing in 90 minutes all-through with brief blackouts to separate the scenes. Inevitably, you feel a little punchdrunk by the end - but that is, I'm sure, the intention. Just don't mention Rowan Atkinson's Gerald, who would no doubt be livid.

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