Theatre review: Despite the wordiness and monstrous plotlines, Strange Interlude is gripping

First the good news. Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill has been cut down from five hours to just under three and a half. The action, if you can call it that, begins at 7 p.m. but if you reach the Lyttelton theatre at the more civilised hour of 8 you’ll have missed very little. The first act could be disposed of in six words, ‘my fiancé died in the war’, but O’Neill is such a colossal twaddler that he wastes absolutely ages gabbling on about this and that before plunging into his story.

The main character, Nina, is a bourgeois flapper who approaches life in a spirit of cynical pragmatism. In the middle of Act II (at roughly 8.10 p.m., in real time), she marries an impotent jerk whose bloodline turns out to be infested with lunacy. Fearful of giving birth to a coop of halfwits, Nina seduces a dashing hunk and passes off the resulting pregnancy as the jerk’s. She is then torn between the jerk and the hunk but her craving for stability compels her to plump for the jerk. He sinks a fortune into a dud advertising agency that turns into a gold mine. They become millionaires. In the 1920s, Nina would have been frowned upon as ‘an adventuress’ and O’Neill was keen to excite the audience’s sense of moral disapproval.

Today we regard Nina as a plucky, independent go-getter and the play has lost its ability to shock or scandalise. There’s another snag, too. O’Neill’s experimental use of soliloquies lumbers the show with confusion and sluggishness. The characters keep turning towards the audience to deliver knowing asides, which aren’t intended to be heard by the other characters. O’Neill was so pleased with this sloppy contrivance that he feared it would be instantly and widely copied.