He would run a pretty good encounter group too. Spacey gives you not only the pain of guilt but something more unusual and important. Towards the end there is a long, long silence, not demanded by O'Neill's always garrulous stage-directions. Spacey's Hickey looks at his flock and takes pity on them. He allows them to retreat again into their protective life-lies and, from there, into an uproariously coarse drinking spree.
Evasion is our lot.
Written in 1939, but not performed until 1946, The Iceman Cometh is a pivotal work of 20th-century drama, looking back to Ibsen and Strindberg and forward to Beckett, Albee and Mamet. Spacey superbly captures Hickey's born-again vitality, his spiels combining the glib fluency of the salesman with the fervour of the preacher's son. He is one of those actors who compel attention as if by right, and even in the early scenes there's a hint of darkness behind the charm. It was in the great last act, when he describes how he killed his loving wife because her constant forgiveness had become intolerable, that shivers raced down my spine. It is an unforgettable night which confirms Howard Davies as a director with an extraordinary gift for combining the intimate and the epic, the funny and the piercingly sad.