The dialogue is often overblown, and the accents are as strong as the central performances, but Rob Ashford's powerful production succeeds in making the melodramatic ring almost true in this rarely revived 1921 Pulitzer prize-winner by Eugene O'Neill.
Set in a dingy waterfront saloon and a sea-going coal barge (convincingly realised in Paul Wills' planked design which tilts and rises steeply to the accompaniment of Adam Cork's evocative shanty soundscape) it features, like several of O'Neill's works, a ‘fallen’ woman, a virile, rough-mannered man and a troubled history. It's been 15 years since Swedish seafarer Chris Christopherson last saw his daughter. Benign but wrong-thinking, he convinced himself that the then 5 year old Anna would be safer staying with her farming Minnesota cousins, blaming that old devil sea (rather than himself) for his failure even to visit.
And Anna, too, has maintained her own fiction – her letters failing to mention that she long ago exchanged the countryside for the whorehouse.
Tough, but with an underlying vulnerability, Ruth Wilson's damaged Anna feels almost healed by the sea when she finally joins her father on his barge, but the tension between David Hayman's weather-beaten Christopherson and shipwrecked Irish stoker Mat Burke forces her to reveal a past which is likely to sabotage the unexpected chance of redemption she so longs for.
All beard and rippling muscle, Jude Law's Burke is compelling from the moment he hauls himself aboard. Drenched, glistening, fearless, he's first enthralled by the unexpected blonde vision, then driven to explosive anger by Anna's revelations. One can understand his disillusioned rage – and her father's refusal to believe that his little girl has strayed from the straight and narrow – but, as O'Neill makes abundantly clear, their own behaviour has been far from virtuous.
Donmar (This is London)
Set in a dingy waterfront saloon and a sea-going coal barge (convincingly realised in Paul Wills' planked design which tilts and rises steeply to the accompaniment of Adam Cork's evocative shanty soundscape) it features, like several of O'Neill's works, a ‘fallen’ woman, a virile, rough-mannered man and a troubled history. It's been 15 years since Swedish seafarer Chris Christopherson last saw his daughter. Benign but wrong-thinking, he convinced himself that the then 5 year old Anna would be safer staying with her farming Minnesota cousins, blaming that old devil sea (rather than himself) for his failure even to visit.
And Anna, too, has maintained her own fiction – her letters failing to mention that she long ago exchanged the countryside for the whorehouse.
Tough, but with an underlying vulnerability, Ruth Wilson's damaged Anna feels almost healed by the sea when she finally joins her father on his barge, but the tension between David Hayman's weather-beaten Christopherson and shipwrecked Irish stoker Mat Burke forces her to reveal a past which is likely to sabotage the unexpected chance of redemption she so longs for.
All beard and rippling muscle, Jude Law's Burke is compelling from the moment he hauls himself aboard. Drenched, glistening, fearless, he's first enthralled by the unexpected blonde vision, then driven to explosive anger by Anna's revelations. One can understand his disillusioned rage – and her father's refusal to believe that his little girl has strayed from the straight and narrow – but, as O'Neill makes abundantly clear, their own behaviour has been far from virtuous.
Donmar (This is London)
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