Arches Theatre, Glasgow and touring 2007

Benny Young as Erie Smith.

SORRY FOR giving the game away, but we never get to meet Hughie. He’s dead before Eugene O’Neill’s play begins, an unsung night clerk who spent his working life in a seedy New York hotel, watching the city race by and making little impression on the world before passing away.

He was the kind of guy who might have been impressed – or perhaps just diverted – by Erie Smith, the hotel guest with exciting tales to tell about the gangsters and gambling tables of the Big Apple. But for all the bravado of Smith, played here by Benny Young, he leads a life that is just as empty and meaningless as Hughie’s.

Now Hughie is dead, there’s another night clerk behind the desk. This one, played by Neil Docherty in Andy Arnold’s production for Glasgow’s Arches Theatre, isn’t required to do much (apart from the very brief unrelated monologue that starts the show), but his presence is important.

The more Young’s haggard gambler talks, boasting about his big breaks and runs of luck, the more self-deluding he seems. For all the difference it makes, he might as well be the night clerk himself, just another interchangeable cog in the indifferent machine of the big city.

That idea terrifies Smith. He yearns to mean something, to hang with the big boys, to score with the women, to be a success. The domestic routines and uneventful workload of the night clerk presumably terrify him, yet the only thing he has to distinguish himself from the next man is the gambler’s belief that a lucky streak is just around the corner.

Being a chronic gambler, he’s an unreliable narrator: we can’t trust his stories of big wins and neither can we believe in the intimacy he claims to have enjoyed with the late Hughie.

All the same, there is something touching in his professed affection for the dead man, a sad realisation that this casual acquaintance was one of the few real relationships Smith ever had.

Ruggedly acted by Young, the play is not a major work, but a short, carefully studied character portrait that captures the poignancy of the lonely man in room 492 trying to count for something in the heartless city.

(Hughie can be seen at the Spectrum Centre, Inverness, 9 June; Ceilidh Place, Ullapool, 11 June; Carnegie Hall, Clashmore, 12 June; Lonach Hall, Strathdon, 18 June; Aberdeen Arts Centre, 19 June).

© Mark Fisher, 2007

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