Robert Tanitch reviews The First Man at Jermyn Street Theatre, London SW1
Anthony Biggs, artistic director of Jermyn Street Theatre, comes up with a play by Eugene O’Neill, which has never been seen in the UK and which will be of major interest to all theatre enthusiasts
The First Man got bad reviews at its premiere in 1922. O‘Neill didn’t like the play, either. “It’s no good,” he said. Five days later his The Hairy Ape opened to critical acclaim. Interestingly, a revival of The Hairy Ape is about to open at the Old Vic.
The play’s failure is, perhaps, not surprising. The leading character, an anthropologist (played by Adam Jackson-Smith) is totally unsympathetic and indulges in rather too much morbid ranting, seemingly unaware how objectionable his views are.
He puts his own self-fulfillment first and expects his wife (Charlotte Asprey) to sacrifice motherhood for his career, which involves going to Asia for five years on a scientific expedition to find the Missing Link in the evolutionary chain.
He has got the funding and the OK to take her with him. The baby gets in his way. But she wants the baby; they have already lost two children, who died of pneumonia. Time is running out. She’s 38 and she wishes he were not so utterly masculine and had just a tiny bit of feminism in him.
She dies in childbirth, in terrible, screaming agony. His family, meanwhile, a chorus of puritanical disapproval, is convinced that his wife has been unfaithful with his best friend and that the child is not his. They fear his immediate departure for the Gobi Desert will fuel the small-town gossip even more.
O’Neill wrote The First Man in 1921 during his second marriage and clearly identified with the anthropologist. Much of the hysterical ranting about parenthood and children is lifted directly from his letters to his wife.
I suspect the real reason he did not like play was because there was too much of himself in it. O’Neill, too, put his career before wife and children and never allowed anything to interfere with his work.
