A Corking Good Egg

For reasons I don't quite understand I found myself reading Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude today, without quite meaning to. I think it had something to do with the fact that I'd been telling someone how teaching Long Day's Journey had been one of the highlights of my career and I felt some kind of need to re-visit the only great writer I can think of who can be quite spectacularly bad at times, Strange Interlude being one of those times. The basic gimmick of the play, to represent what the characters are thinking along with the spoken dialogue, in the form of interspersed chunks of stream of consciousness, doesn't work at all even on the page - and I've no idea what went on in the theatre. It doesn't work because O'Neill can't do stream of consciousness. The thoughts sound much like the dialogue, except a bit more revelatory and, therefore, more embarrassing. (I kept thinking of just how good Joyce is at convincing the reader that his characters really are thinking, which is a bit unfair on the dramatist, but there you go.)

Anyway, I managed the first two acts, but I'm not sure I can be bothered to keep going - not at the moment, at least. But having said all that, there was one aspect of O'Neill's dialogue I found engrossing, but not in any proper dramatic or literary sense. The colloquialisms associated with a couple of the characters seemed to be straight out of the pages of P.G. Wodehouse. Did the Yanks really refer to each other as good eggs in the early twentieth century? And did they actually say that a girl was a corker? I hope so. And wouldn't the world be a better place if we could bring these gems back? Never such innocence again.