Strange Interlude, National Theatre - theatre review

Pruned back to a relatively reasonable three hours 20 minutes, the play shines with a quiet magnificence thanks to stand-out performances from Anne-Marie Duff and Charles Edwards
29 August 2013

The task of a national theatre, as the person who takes over from outgoing artistic director Nicholas Hytner will learn, is a multi-tentacled one.

Reviving rarely performed classics is a key area of its remit. Indeed, it is hard to think of any other company that would have the audacity — or resources — to tackle Eugene O’Neill’s nine-act, five-hour 1928 Pulitzer Prize winner.

Even pruned back to a more reasonable three hours 20 minutes it is still a daunting challenge — albeit one that, thanks to stand-out performances from Anne-Marie Duff and Charles Edwards, shines with quiet magnificence come Act Nine. And that, as my friend said on the way out, is not a description one often gets to use of a drama.

O'Neill did not just go in for endurance but also formal innovation. His characters frequently intersperse lines of dialogue with lengthy “asides”, expressing their private thoughts to the viewer unheard by their fellows on stage.

It is, as one writer put it, the “novel in play form” and it serves to make us intriguingly complicit. It is also a nicely involving gesture from the imposing Lyttelton stage.

Despite the plethora of occasionally melodramatic words and scenes, there is only a small cast of characters, all of whom pinball around the beautiful and mercurial Nina Leeds (Duff). Her corrosive grief for the unseen fiancé killed in the First World War, followed by some warped notions of how she might make reparations for this, is what powers the action and induces her to marry silly, amiable Sam (Jason Watkins).

A child, she thinks, might re-focus her “morbid longing for martyrdom”. Her words, inflected like those of the others by the language of psychoanalysis, are startling in their sexual frankness.

Duff’s lively, vulnerable face is a constant joy to see as she ages triumphantly down the years, taking Nina through some pitch-black emotions en route to ultimate reconciliation. She is matched by Edwards as family friend Charles Marsden, tempted and tortured in equal measure by the mysteries of sex.

Edwards excels at bruised decency like no other actor and he brings the house down in Act Eight when, still the eternal onlooker, he bleats, “What am I doing here?” Simon Godwin, making a National debut of quiet assurance, directs with precision and squeezes maximum value from a series of stately scene changes. This is what a national theatre is for and we are fortunate to have it here in London.

Booking until August 12 (020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk).

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