Strange Interlude – review

Eugene O'Neill's 1928 play is famous for many things: its inordinate length, its prolonged asides and its extensive portrait of one woman, Nina Leeds, over the course of 25 years. But Simon Godwin's nimble Lyttleton revival, the first in Britain since 1984, not only reduces O'Neill's baggy monster to a neat three-and-a-quarter hours, but suggests it is less a searing drama about Nina than a spry comedy about her long-time admirer, Charles Marsden.

We watch Nina progress from professor's daughter, grieving for her dead fiance, to widowed Long Island hostess, disconsolately watching the departure of her adored son. In the interim we see her marrying a naive ad man; falling in love with a raffish doctor, Edmund Darrell – the father of her child; and treating the pathetically constant Marsden as a surrogate father. But ultimately Nina seems like a construct composed of all the women O'Neill has ever known. Anne-Marie Duff does a fine job in charting Nina's transitions, and is especially good at her early frazzled neurosis and later maternal fixation. Duff is infinitely adaptable, but even she finds it hard to discover a through‑line on the role.

The evening really belongs to Charles Edwards as the neutered novelist, Marsden. He not only acts as a chorus, slyly commenting on the hypocrisies of Nina and the surrounding society, he also makes brilliant comic use of O'Neill's asides, in which characters reveal their secret thoughts. In one astonishing moment Edwards appears sobbing uncontrollably over the death of his mother, only to switch in a second to inner rage at being patronised as "poor old Charlie". And there are few things funnier than the sight of the immaculately tailored Edwards watching an undergraduate boat race from the deck of a motor-cruiser and asking, as Henry James might at a rugby match: "What am I doing here?"

O'Neill, I suspect, secretly sympathised with the mordantly observant, misogynist Marsden. But Godwin's production suggests he also identified with Nina's lover, Darrell, whom the wiry, dark-moustached Darren Pettie turns into a dead ringer for the author. Jason Watkins as Nina's hapless husband and Geraldine Alexander as her melodramatic mother–in-law do good work in what remains a rum old play, one that asks us to believe simultaneously in the notion of hereditary insanity and the idea that a father would not recognise his son's questionable parentage. But Godwin's excellent production, deftly designed by Soutra Gilmour, works by acknowledging that inside O'Neill the autobiographical heavyweight was a comic writer struggling to get out.