By ROBERT HEWISON

The last act of Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet (Young Vic) has in close proximity the three sentences that justify his title as father of American drama: “I love you”; “I hate you”; and “I shall join my good friends at the bar.” Love, hate, drink, and above all, “dreams” flow straight from O’Neill’s plays to Tennessee William’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, now in a stunning production at the National Theatre. There, Williams reworks these themes in such as “I love you - maybe you’re drunk enough to believe me.”

In both plays, the family unit, not society, is the site of battling conflicts - as it is also in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, at the Aldwych. O’Neill’s drama echoes his dynamic status, for it was intended as the first in an American family saga, running from the 1820’s to the 1930’s - when he conceived the project. At its outset, the American dream of progress has to claw its way clear from a Romantic, Byronic dream of old Europe.

This battle is fought between father and daughter. Timothy Dalton is a dishonoured, drunken Irishman newly arrived in America in the 1820’s, who cannot shed the illusion that, although now a tavern keeper, he is still the gallant major who fought under Wellington at Talavera. Rudi Davies is his daughter, only too aware of her peasant origins, who sees her way forward by marrying into a wealthy “Yankee” family.

Torn between them is her mother, played by Vanessa Redgrave, transformed into a slattern, a brutalized, guilty peasant whose one reason for living is her passion for the man who humiliates her. The battle is fought over three-and- a-half-hours, and however much there is a tragic inevitability about the way the daughter will suffer from her father’s pride and risks her mother’s fate, it ends on a note of hope. The father sheds his dream; the daughter, however compromised, seems about to achieve hers.

Inevitably, Vanessa Redgrave takes a passive role, but plays it nobly. Timothy Dalton almost overdoes the actorish aspects of his character, and Rudi Davies’ passion overwhelms her articulation. Altogether, David Thacker’s in- the-round production gets in the way of itself, but all this will come into focus when the production moves to the Haymarket. It is already a great achievement.