Anna Christie
According to his curtain-raiser interviews, Jude Law has been aching to outgrow his pretty-boy image and prove his mettle as a proper actor. It’s unfortunate, in that case, that the preview word-of-mouth for this revival of Eugene O’Neill‘s drama Anna Christie has been dominated by the state of Law’s naked upper body.
For those with minds on higher things, there is much else to admire about Rob Ashford‘s production of this 1920 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about an ex-prostitute reunited with her long-absent Swedish father, a coal-barge captain, and who then captures the heart of a shipwrecked Irish sailor.
Law is superb as the manic, histrionic Mat Burke, a Blarney charmer who clumsily crushes his sweetheart’s fingers in his prize-fighter’s fists. Ruth Wilson gives a less showy but more subtle performance in the title role, blinking back tears through every smile on her first appearance, throwing off her mantle of sadness in Mat’s sexually charged presence, and reverting to stoic dignity when she resolves to unburden herself about her past. David Hayman is also impressive as her wiry, superstitious father, combining physical bravery, moral cowardice and childlike innocence. The moment where he squares up to his would-be son-in-law, like a sparrow confronting a panther, has a powerful testosterone charge.
Designer Paul Wills makes an apparently simple stage transform at the tilt of a rake into a ship’s deck in a ferociously stormy sea – complete with shivering drop in temperature in the house. There is further fiendish cleverness when we descend thanks to the the simple positioning of a ladder into the bowels of the vessel, whose ironwork has been there unseen all along.
The production wears its voice-coaching on its oilskin sleeve. O’Neill has a rich sense of the musicality of the immigrant accent, and Law and Hayman give their Irish brogue and Swedish lilt in the period manner he would have expected. If Hayman doesn’t sound like our modern notion of a Scandinavian, his voice is a dead-ringer for George F Marion’s in the 1930 movie version (in which Greta Garbo starred as Anna, her first “talkie”).
A less welcome quirk is to put the interval between the third and final acts. This makes sense dramatically but two hours is a long first half with no break. It’s as if this shortish work by O’Neill’s usual standards is determined to inflict his normal butt-ache torture on the audience.
More importantly, for all the play’s perfect construction and striking psychological accuracy, its central dilemma – the redemption of a woman sullied by her own sexual past – has little modern relevance. In writing Anna with such complete sympathy, the playwright was undoubtedly way ahead of his time. But with the best will in the world, this work struggles to resonate in our own.
– Simon Edge
