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THEATRE: lStage businessPlaywright Jack Hibberd says Australian theatre is in crisis. Director Barrie Koskysays we mustn't do Shakespeare, or at least not the way we're doing it-give it toCircus Oz instead. Peter Craven takes heart from two recentAustralian productions and argues for a national style with nofrills and no aux-Shakespearean accents.E UGENE O'NEILL is the father of modern rv- consumption and told that he will have toAmerican drama. Without him, Miller andTennessee Williams are inconceivable.Without him, we would not have thetortuous psychodramas of Edward Albee orthe familial free-for-alls of Sam Shepard.He gave the American theatre its dialogueand its dilemma. The dialogue tended toconsist of how to kill a loved one, withactions or words. The dilemma was how totravel with this abiding premise ofheartbreak and horror without turning the/""'go into a sanatorium. It is the day whenMary Tyrone, the mother, loses her longbattle with narcotics and the day whenJames Tyrone, hack actor and raconteur,proves himself to be a miser and his elderson, James junior, twists himself into a coilof treachery and intelligence.One ofthe deeply American things aboutthis play is that the Tyrones are presentedas profoundly ordinary people even thoughthe family quartet constitutes four of theplay itself into a carou sel of m elodrama and What Australian theatre richest parts in modern drama.m asochism.The most widely seen version of LongLong Day's Journey Into Night is needs at the moment like Day'sJourneyintoNightisSidneyLum et'sO'N eill's masterpiece, and the towering a shot in the arm iS more film with Katharine Hepburn and Ralphnature of its authority is heightened by theRichardson as Mary and James Tyrone, andfact that its production was so long delayed of this naturalism and Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell as thethat it appeared in the midst of other playssons. It is a gift of a play for actors, bringingfrom the school O'Neill had spawned. this-for want of a better outthefullrangeofwhateverlight anddarkIt's the story of a family engaged in a WOrd-classicism. they have in their bag of tricks. People tendmoment of self-vivisection. Tolstoy saysto remember like beacons the performancesthat an unhappy family is unhappy in its It does not need pseudo- they have seen: Olivier at the N ational orown way, but the great family dramas are asJack Lemmon on Broadway. I once sawintimately familiar as one's own 'domestics' boulevardier hacks Prunella Scales (Sybil from Fawlty Towers)and are written in a language which is in noas a sturdy Mary Tyrone and then, a week orway beyond the level of our nightmares. We falling On their bottOmS so later, the great Bibi Anderson, ravishingfeel for these people and are appalled by pretending to be and ravaged, in a Swedish productionthem because they go for each other anddirected by Ingmar Bergman.continue to love each other in ways that Trevor Nunn. The first thing to be said about Michaelstare us out of thought, because what weEdwards' production of O'Neill's masterrecogniseare our own fears distorted or Allofthisgivesthe playan extraordinary piece with Robyn N evin and John Bell fortransfigured in some moment of violence warmth. Its very idioms seem so rooted in the Bell Shakespeare Company is that it isor agony of vehemence. universal habits of mind (self-delusion, self- up there with productions that peopleHamlet is famously the play in which revelation and pride, self-satisfaction, remember for the rest of their lives. This isthe leading actor has licence to play himself criticism of others, castigation and calamity a supple, intelligent, ferociously invigor-(orsom eextrovertedandconfiguredversion and attack with long knives) that it now ated representation of O'N eill's drama andof the gestures of that self), but Long Day's appears almost comic in its exhibition of it's not only the best thing I have seen theJoumeyislikea partforaquartetofHamlets, the postures through which we strut. Bell company do, it is one of the besteach haunted by his own ghost, each on a Long Day's Journey Into Night is as productions to be seen on the Australianvengeful quest to break down the spirit of freshandasblackasthedayEugeneO'N eill stage in years.the others, as if revenge had becom e a wrote it. It is the confabulated story of a Michael Edwards, an Australian whopsychologi cal and self-destructive family on one not-uncharacteristic day of works in America, gets m ore imaginativecompulsion, inseparable from the bond of crisis. This is the day when the younger mileage than you would expect from thelove and the pieties of attachment. Tyrone son, Edmund, is diagnosed as having simple decision to dispense with AmericanV OLUME 9 N UMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 43