When Eugene O’Neill wrote Desire Under the Elms (1924) – the story of a father and son pitted against each other, and the neurotic love between a young bride and her step-son that culminates in infanticide – he looked to the Greek legends of Medea and Oedipus. His character’s self-destructive, murderous passions and naïve declarations of undying love are today the stuff of melodrama rather than the ‘unflinching realism’ of rural life they were perceived as portraying to the New Yorkers of the 1920s. The play is still far less performed than say his Long Day’s Journey Into Night, as the kind of amour fou it depicts has been generally supplanted by a more cynical, if sensible approach to the vagaries of the human heart.
But along comes Nerina Ferreira’s seamless adaptation and masterful translation into accessible, yet poetic Afrikaans. She has (among various prudent changes) replaced the entire action of the first three and half scenes with a single monologue; she has reduced the cast of five and bit parts to only three; and she has transposed the setting from 1850s New England to a bleak remote platteland plaas where soliloquy and relentless melodramatic action seems natural amongst the stony ground and its isolated, obsessing characters. The melodrama is suddenly believable.
However, it seems the ossified Old Testament patriarch – embodied in Ephraim Cabot (Marius Weyers) – has been unseated both on and off stage in democratic South Africa. When he bursts into prayer immediately after coitus with “God forgive me”, belly laughs followed at his verkrampte double standards. Yet the archetype is still compelling.
Jan Ellis is outstanding as the smouldering caged male animal Eben, with all the sexual energy of a Brando, even if somewhat inauthentically costumed in trendy jeans and white vest that strengthens the reference. It is good to see this fine actor back on the Cape Town stage after a considerable absense.
Anna-Mart van der Merwe, one of our keurigste actresses is an inspired choice as the backveld Abbie. She has been praised for her wonderful make-over as a ‘slut’, presumably because she seduces both father and son. But this is of course a radically male chauvinist construction and a hopeless misreading of both O’Neill and van der Merwe’s performance. She is a passionate woman in terrible circumstances, who is prepared to do anything, including sacrificing her only chance at material gain, for nothing but love. Van der Merwe succeeds in a similar way Sophia Loren did in her Hollywood debut in the same role in Delbert Mann’s 1957-film version. Incidentally, Anthony Perkins – who played opposite her as Eben – gave one of his best film performances, before he became typecast.
Janice Honeyman’s direction is stark and uninhibited. On opening (and I was told on the preview nights as well) the audience became nervous and coy. Whereas hick middle America was scandalised by the moral outrages of O’Niell’s ‘morbid plumbing’, our apparently sophisticated urbanites of today received the nudity and sexual explicitness of Begeerte with immature giggles.
It is an excellent production – thanks to strong performances and Ferreira’s exceptional dramaturgy. As a result O’Niell’s work has been given a renewed lease and Begeerte has the feel of a play belonging to the bekroonde Afrikaans canon.
