Theatre
The Iceman Cometh (Almeida) Our Lady of Sligo (National Theatre, Cottesloe)
Shared terror
Sheridan Morley
The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O'Neill's great, flawed masterpiece, written over seven years from 1939 and played ever since over more than four hours, has not had an easy stage history in Britain. Of its two major productions since the war, one had a Hickey who departed in mid- rehearsal and the other caused Ian Holm so massive an attack of stage fright that he spent the next 20 years exclusively in movies, only then returning to the National to. storm the other great actors' mountain that is King Lear. But the good news now, from the Almei- da in Islington, is that at last we have a definitive Iceman in Kevin Spacey, yet another Hollywood star on loan to north London at a minimal salary to establish His credentials unavailable elsewhere. tlis Hickey, the wife-murdering Iceman of the title, is just about the most impressive London star debut I can recall; and in a truly magnificent production Howard Davies has surrounded him with an equally stellar cast of 20 of the best character actors in town, all adding up to a theatrical team and a stage experience which has been rivalled neither by the National nor the RSC these last 20 years. Spacey's Iceman erupts into a no-hope bar in the New York of 1912, Harry Hope's end-of-the-world saloon, there to spread the word that a life of reality, however ter- rible, is surely better than a slow death of disillusion. Spacey sees the Iceman as a weird mix of Billy Graham and Willy Oman, out there with nothing but a sinis- ter smile and a shoeshine to convince his Old drinking pals of the new world that is awaiting them if only they could stay sober enough just to cross the street. These men, and their very few women, all prostitutes, are out there on a smile and a shoeshine, peddling life in living death and almost all now totally withdrawn from an outside, real world which has rejected them just as they have rejected their own lives and hopes. All live on the borderline where the American dream turns into its Own worst nightmare, and these drinkers are all dying the deaths of travelling sales- men at the end of a long road. ■ It is arguable that O'Neill, the great patriarch of Broadway and the playwright who laid out the map on which all contem- porary American drama is still written, gave his Iceman not only the longest speech ever to challenge an American actor but also flashes of sheer theatrical electricity. These suddenly illuminate a long evening with mesmeric insights into the lives and losses of 20 disparate characters, linked only by drink and their shared terror of any world beyond the saloon doors.
Hickey may well be Death or the Messi- ah as well as the local killer; he has come somewhat mysteriously to call and when he departs, in handcuffs which he is all too eager to adopt, no other living soul in that bar will ever be quite the same again.
His truth spreads like a plague through the saloon, where each of the drinkers who have had their lives however briefly gal- vanised and reorganised by Hickey greet his ultimate arrest with something like glee, because it means they can sink back, unin- terrupted and unchallenged, into their pipe dreams. Iceman is the first truly great epic of the modern American theatre, and its legacy is the intimate stripping of the soul which we now take for granted in drama worldwide.
The brilliance of this Howard Davies production is to understand that it is a group confessional and to cast it with such utter accuracy. Tim Pigott-Smith as the only observer who at the last comes to see what Hickey wanted, Patrick Godfrey and Nicholas Day still fighting out the Boer War, Clarke Peters as the gambling pianist, Ian Bartholomew as the tomorrow man for whom it never comes are but half of a cast who each deserves some kind of medal for gallantry and for using the few minutes allotted each to make a vehement ease for this story to be exclusively about them.
In a powerfully Irish week, Sebastian Barry's Our Lady of Sligo betrays an odd debt to O'Neill, for here too a single char- acter takes centre stage for 20-minute monologues of despair and disgust as she looks back on a life wasted by alcohol. Sinead Cusack, in the performance of her career, remains bedridden as she dies of cancer in a 1953 Dublin hospital. But she too is 53, and it does not take us long to realise that Our Lady of Sligo is not neces- sarily the religious painting on the wall, nor even perhaps the cancer victim, desperately trying to make some sense of her tragically wasted life even as it wastes her. Not to put it too heavily, what we have here is Ireland herself in the first half of this century, con- demned by de Valera to be way outside any European action and turned so far in on herself that drink and illicit sex are all she has left to occupy the passing years.
Nigel Terry gives a no-less touching per- formance as the army officer also drowned in drink and violence; Our Lady of Sligo may not ostensibly be connected to the headlines of this week, as once again in giving us Ireland's past as a poetic histori- an, Barry also manages to give us visionary glimpses of an essentially unchanging future. In telling with brutal clarity the story of his own grandmother, Barry has also given us the story of her nation in no less torment, and Max Stafford-Clark's production is as magnificent as its two cen- tral performances.
7 shall have overall control, but my col- league, Mr. Schultz, will do the twiddly bits.'
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