The son blazes in this long hot summer of discontent
EUGENE O’Neill’s 1933 Ah, Wilderness! is termed a comedy, but that seems an unsatisfactory description.
Though the story has charming moments of innocent, teenage love, there are other points of tense, family drunkenness when the thing seems just as likely to spill into tragedy. Seldom are we made to laugh. Yet ‘comedy’ it remains, in the sense of having a sweet ending.
Director Natalie Abrahami gives the 110-minute play (no interval) an interesting staging, with the set covered in sand to create the summery Connecticut shore where the story unfolds.
The comfortably-off Miller family lives here, Dad (Martin Marquez) being a bigshot on the local paper. In the family is a boozy uncle (Dominic Rowan), a spinster aunt (Susannah Wise), an unruly maid (Eleanor McLoughlin) and a naughty youngest son (excellent Rory Stroud on Press night).
Janie Dee’s charming, fretful mother runs the home as best she can.
The family’s teenage, middle son Richard (George MacKay), is a poetry-reading idealist who has fallen for a wellto-do girl whose father tries to stop them meeting. A letter arrives in which she apparently dumps him. Richard goes off on a bender and is nearly corrupted by a prostitute.
Comic fare? It could be, in the hands of other playwrights. This being O’Neill, there is a gloomy foreboding. We are told, by an undefined, Edwardian narrator (David Annen, looking like Eugene O’Neill), that the year is 1906. Puzzlingly, the other characters are in 21st-century dress.
The plot hinges on a virginal innocence hard to credit today. Abrahami may be trying to tell us life has not changed much in 110 years. But I was confused. The best part is that of teenager Richard. Mr MacKay may be five years too old, but he brings out Richard’s naivete. Miss Dee is a delight to watch and Mr Rowan wrings some smiles from his drunken routine.
I was less convinced by Mr Marquez, yet a moment of affection between his character and Richard is touching. Ah, Wilderness! is not the world’s, or O’Neill’s, greatest play, but I have had many a worse evening and Mr MacKay is plainly bound for great things.