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Mourning Becomes Electra

  • opened: 11/27/2003
  • closed: 1/31/2004
  • National Theatre, Lyttelton
  • Box Office: 020 7452 3000
  • Details:
  • Summary: Visit listenNOW to hear a full discussion. Eugene O'Neill's epic drama, first produced in 1931, gets a monumental staging by Howard Davies in a production that runs to four-and-a-half hours. O'Neill transposed the essential storyline of the Oresteia to a New England setting in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Returning Brigadier Ezra Mannon (Tim Piggott-Smith) couldn't be a more unwelcome guest in his own home; his embittered wife Christine (Helen Mirren) has taken up with a handsome young captain, Adam Brant, and plots his murder the moment he sets foot back inside their stately mansion; her behaviour raises the ire of her critical, puritanical daughter Lavinia (Eve Best) who, in her Electra-like passion, enlists her brother Orin in the task of exposing and punishing their mother. The reviews have been surprisingly enthusiastic given the evening's undoubted length, and the undeniable weaknesses of O'Neill's tragedy. Michael Billington in the Guardian awarded Howard Davies' production five stars: 'You could accuse O'Neill of hitching a lift on the back of Greek tragedy. What he actually does is use a classic archetype to explore the link between doomed individuals and a decaying society... When Tim Piggott-Smith's excellent, anxiety-ridden Ezra speaks of his Puritan upbringing, in which 'being born was starting to die', he is not merely paraphrasing Freud but articulating O'Neill's main theme: the way a death-ridden culture contaminates individuals and destroys families.' Benedict Nightingale in the Times confessed: 'The famous putdown by George Jean Nathan of Eugene O'Neill - that his work sinks 'with a certain majesty, like a great ship, its flags flying' - was in my head when I prepared to endure four-odd hours of Mourning Becomes Electra. That was because the play did indeed plunge to a watery grave the last time I saw it: in 1991 Glasgow, with Glenda Jackson rasping and snarling from the bridge as she vanished beneath the waves.' He added: 'I couldn't have been more confounded.' In the Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer also explained: 'Four and a half hours of relentless anguish doesn't look like the ideal formula for a great night out. I can only report that I emerged from Howard Davies's electrifying staging of Mourning Becomes Electra feeling thrilled, and chilled, to the marrow. This epic drama gets you immediately in its grip and never lets go, the performances are shatteringly fine and the sheer relentlessness of O'Neill's dark vision of fallen humanity becomes paradoxically exhilarating.' In the Daily Mail, Michael Coveney proclaimed: 'Mirren is magnificent, eaten with sexual longing, disgusted in her marriage to war hero Ezra Mannon, bluffly and credibly played by Tim Pigott-Smith... The central character is her daughter Lavinia. Eve Best is wonderful as this avenging Electra.' In the Sunday Independent, Kate Bassett suggested: 'For all its flaws, this piece is still impressively strong. Most strikingly it comes across as an anti-war protest with reverberations down the ages, in that Orin returns home psychologically damaged by the carnage he has seen... and, she added, 'The whole American dream of leaving your past behind and starting over is gloomily contested by this play.' In the Observer, Susannah Clapp generally approved of the production, but said of the play: 'It's arresting; big on plot and scanty on expression. It's stuffed with old-style seductive belles, incestuous alliances, steamy plots and no-holds-barred truth-telling and - oh lawdie - black folk crooning Shenandoah... In modernising, [O'Neill] miniaturised: though every now and then someone declares that a particularly unnecessary and improbable event had to be, considerations of retribution evaporate in the characters' bed-bouncing. Every time someone dips into their dreams they come up waving a cliche.' Georgina Brown in the Mail on Sunday wrote: 'Imagine an omnibus edition of Dynasty (love, hate, grief, melodramatic scale) injected with a Greek tragedy's sense of fate and you have something of the flavour of this remarkable rich and rarely performed piece.' 'Heady stuff?' asked Matt Wolf in the Sunday Times: 'To be sure, as any rewrite of Aeschylus's Oresteia would be, but potentially ridiculous too, and it is the director Howard Davies's supreme achievement that he commands an appreciation of the play on its own ripely unsparing terms.'
  • Author: Eugene O'Neill
  • Director: Howard Davies
  • Composer: Dominic Muldowner
  • Lyricist: n/aSet Designer: Bob Crowley
  • Lighting Designer: Mark Henderson
  • Costume Designer: n/a
  • Choreographer: Stuart Hopps
  • Cast Details: Clarke Peters (Seth Beckwith); Eve Best (Lavinia Mannon) Helen Mirren (Christine Mannon); Paul McGann (Cpt Adam Brant); Tim Pigott-Smith (Ezra Mannon).