The emotionally searing quality of Eugene O'Neill's great drama is vested in its inexorable length and in the merciless repetitions of the individual self-delusions of the deeply dysfunctional Tyrone family in New England, the dramatic representation of the author's own family.
The Irish Repertory of Chicago has brought to the Galway Arts Festival a significantly foreshortened version of the epic (down to a mere three hours) and, under Sheldon Patinkin's highly original direction, plays it at a very considerable clip, even eliding some of the more angry exchanges into a simultaneous delivery of the antagonists' separate attacks on one another.
In a sense, this hardly matters, since none of the characters actually listens to what the others are saying anyway, but it removes O'Neill's slow-drip technique of applying the emotional pain of his audience's gradual realisation that these folk are really talking to themselves rather than to each other.
In John Mahoney's James Tyrone, there is no trace of the hauteur of the old actor-manager, the matinee idol who became too commercially successful for his own good on the American stage. The tyranny he exercised over his emotionally crippled family is here contained in a series of small angry outbursts of what seems like mere irritation.
His wretched wife, Mary, (Annabel Armour), turned into a morphine addict by the incompetent doctor who supervised the delivery of her son Edmund, is maintained in that addiction by James's miserly provision of the sort of treatment she did not need. She is driven repetitiously back into her unsatisfactory past from her even less satisfactory present as she watches Edmund (David Cromer) dying from tuberculosis and his older brother, Jamie (John Judd), floundering in drink and whores.
The speed of Mr Patinkin's staging does not always allow these deeply-drawn characters to establish the depth of their pain, and when we watch Mr Mahoney and Mr Cromer playing with consummate technique for laughs (and getting them) in what O'Neill wrote as his rapprochement with his dead father, a great deal of emotional trust with the audience is dissipated, and the play is diminished from a major tragedy to a mere, but fascinating, documentary on one aspect of the Irish diaspora in North America.
Plays until Sunday, 7.30 p.m.
