Review – Strange Interlude, National Theatre

What are the chances?

You wait an eternity for an infidelity tragi-comedy in which the audience are party to the characters’ innermost thoughts and then you are afforded two in a row.

Just days after visiting Passion Play, where actors play the two main characters’ alter egos, comes Eugene O’Neill‘s 1928 Pulitzer Prize-winner Strange Interlude in which every character makes asides to the audience revealing what they’re really thinking. It’s the Shakespearean device by way of TV’s Peep Show.

Andrew had chickened out of this one on the grounds of life being too short but Phil gamely picked up the cudgel or something and as he occasionally has thoughts in his heads too, has been inspired to go with the zeitgeist and opening up the peculiar workings of his own psyche.

Review – Long Day’s Journey into Night, Apollo Theatre

“I don’t feel so bad about my drinking now,” chirped Andrew as he breezed out of the Apollo Theatre after Long Day’s Journey into Night and headed into a local hostelry feeling utterly reborn as a paragon of self-restraint.

History shall record that Eugene O’Neil’s life and works were not in vain then. His famously long autobiographical drama about a dysfunctional family (which he didn’t want published until 25 years after his death and never, ever performed) has served at least one useful purpose.

Review – Anna Christie, Donmar Warehouse

Dear Andrew,

They say you can’t be in two places at the same time, but obviously the Whingers can. You swanned off to the Edinburgh Festival and unlike last year, you haven’t even had the courtesy to send even a postcard.

Your departing instructions were to “mop the surrounds”: take in the Pinter you suggested or perhaps the Caryl Churchill. Thanks a bundle.

Then you handed me the much sought-after tickets for Anna Christie – hot presumably because Jude Law is in it and not because you’ve been holding them in clammy palms. And it is a Eugene O’Neill to boot (not a master of the art of  brevity) while you’ll be seeing shows in Edinburgh that last what –  an hour or less?

But what would you have made of it? In a Being John Malkovich sort of way I’m going to try the unthinkable and get inside your head and imaginge what you’d have made of it.