A Moon for the Misbegotten

by Eugene O'Neill

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 30 July 2025

Rebecca Frecknall directs Ruth Wilson as Josie Hogan, David Threlfall as her father Phil and Michael Shannon as James Tyrone, with Peter Corboy as Josie's brother Mike and Akie Kotabe as their neighbour T Stedman Harder in Eugene O'Neill's 1957 play about two young people so insecure that they are unable to admit their feelings for one another in any productive way. 

Josie presents a transgressive front to hide her fears, while James tries to avoid his shames and self-loathing through massive alcohol consumption. This being an O'Neill play, alcohol figures prominently not only for James but also for Phil, an embittered Irish-American tenant farmer all too ready to drown his own sorrows and frustrations in drink. James Tyrone is, of course, the name of one of the two sons (and the father) in Long Day's Journey into Night, and though this character is not exactly the same person in the two plays, both share a tortured family history inspired by that of the playwright himself; in A Moon for the Misbegotten both James's parents are already dead.

The challenge is to render these characters believable and interesting despite their verbosity and inebriation, and both Michael Shannon and David Threlfall manage this tricky task with great skill, and in completely different ways: Shannon trying to be tight-lipped but occasionally permitting a despairing giggle; Threlfall clumsy in his movements, and hamming it up to a certain extent because Phil is probably not as drunk as he makes out to be. In the meantime Josie fends off her father's manipulations and warily engages with James Tyrone using a front of almost raucous bravado: her final relinquishment of any relationship with James, couched in rueful good wishes for his future, is painful to witness. Ruth Wilson, known in the past for portraying deeply repressed women with stillness and menace, here demonstrates a more brazen exterior, but the inner pain remains.

The Almeida stage was stripped back to reveal the brickwork at the rear, and most of the stage podium had also been removed to be replaced by dusty wood-floor areas on different levels, with all sorts of farming bric-a-brac - old planks, sheets of metal, implements - lying around: the chaos of the Hogans being both internal and external. With most of the action in the central part of the play taking place during a moonlit night, the atmosphere was almost derelict, and perfectly suited the action. Designers Tom Scutt (set) and Jack Knowles (lighting) made excellent use of the space available.

Faith Healer

by Brian Friel

seen by live streaming from the Old Vic on 18 September 2020

Matthew Warchus directed Michael Sheen as Frank Hardy the eponymous faith healer, Indira Varma as his wife Grace and David Threlfall as his manager Teddy in Brian Friel's powerful play, presented in the Old Vic's 'In Camera' series of filmed live performances for which one can buy a ticket for viewing from one's own home. The theatre itself is devoid of an audience, and only the actors and a skeleton technical staff are in the building during a performance.

The play is ideally suited to the constraints imposed by the government's regulations in response to the current pandemic. It consists of four monologues, by Frank, Grace, Teddy and then Frank again, in which only one actor at a time need be onstage. The three characters speak of fateful trips to a village in Sunderland and to another in County Donegal, presenting the audience with a series of conundrums as it becomes clear that each of them remembers events that cannot all be true, since they are contradictory. That all three are speaking of the same events is clear from the repetition of whole phrases of description, mainly to do with geographic positioning, but their recollections of event and motivation complicate the picture in a way which a more conventional dramatic presentation would be hard pressed to emulate. Is this just the inevitable unreliability of memories of trauma, or is there deliberate or prudential falsification? The playwright gives no real clue, leaving us to draw our own conclusions and to construct our own sense of what may have happened. 

I last saw and reviewed the play at the Donmar in August 2016; it was fascinating to see it again with a different cast and essentially through a different medium. Michael Sheen's Frank was an impassioned man possibly using his old habit of chanting Welsh and Scottish village names to calm his nerves before an engagement to mask a more profound anguish than he can face up to even while trying to confide in us. Neither Indira Varma's fragile Grace nor David Threlfall's drink-sodden Teddy can be free of their own pain, so their recollections too conceal matters on which we are invited to speculate. With all the circumstantial detail of the monologues, there remains an enigma at the heart of the play.

Perhaps the raw power of the play was slightly dulled by the means of transmission: I cannot help feeling that it would have been more overwhelming if one was actually in the auditorium sharing the communal theatrical experience. Nonetheless, in the skilled hands of this formidable cast, it was a great addition to the 'In Camera' season.

Don Quixote

by James Fenton based on the novel by Miguel Cervantes

seen at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 4 April 2016

This new adaptation of the famous Spanish novel commemorates the quartercentenary of Cervantes's death (in the same month as Shakespeare's death). Director Angus Jackson has assembled an excellent ensemble cast led by David Threlfall as Don Quixote and Rufus Hound as his squire Sancho Panza. James Fenton's text, and his lyrics to the songs composed by Grant Olding, capture both the whimsical absurdity of the Don's obsession with chivalry, and the pathos of his response to the 'real' world as he constantly re-interprets it under the delusion that he is a knight-errant facing sorcery and evil.