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.

Long Day's Journey into Night

by Eugene O'Neill

seen at Wynndhams Theatre on 18 February 2018

Richard Eyre directs Jeremy Irons as James Tyrone, Lesley Manville as his wife Mary, Rory Keenan as Jamie and Matthew Beard as Edmund, the two Tyrone sons, and Jessica Regan as Cathleen the maid, in a production designed by Rob Howell.

The play, loosely autobiographical, takes place in the Tyrone's summer house on the day in which Edmund is told by the family doctor that he has consumption. But both his brother and his father have half suspected this (indeed, he may himself have been aware of the likelihood); the menfolk are furthermore confronting the fact that Mary is incurably addicted to morphine, having been prescribe it many years before after Edmund's difficult birth.

Such a bald summary hardly begins to account for the play's power, nor for the unremitting portrayal of self-deception and mutual recrimination that unfolds before us as the various members of the family try to maintain a veneer of normality in the face of long years of denial, repressed anger, and tortured love.

Ah, Wilderness!

by Eugene O'Neill

seen at the Young Vic on 223 May 2015

O'Neill's only comedy, written in 1933, is directed by Natalie Abrahami and stars George Mackay as Richard Miller, Janie Dee as his mother Essie, Martin Marquez as his father Nat, Susannah Wise as his aunt Lily, Dominic Rowan as Sid Davis and David Annen as an unscripted O'Neill figure presiding over the action who also takes a couple of minor parts. The set design is by Dick Bird.

The costumes forego the ostensible setting of the play in 1906, preferring simpler and indeterminate lines from the mid 20th-century, and the set design ignores the painstaking descriptions provided by O'Neill of various locations in and around the Miller's house. Some of these are read out by David Annen, but often against considerable hubbub from the characters, so that they become a background noise - a neat transference from the visual background a set would normally provide. Instead, there is a raised area at the back with openings onto a sky, and on one side an exit to stairs leading up (presumably to bedrooms and a bathroom); and on the other side stairs leading down (presumably out of the house). The various levels visible to the audience are covered in great drifts of sand, with steps only partially visible. Characters usually negotiate the steps quite successfully, unless in a passion of emotion or a fug of inebriation when they tend to trip or slide in the sand alarmingly. It's a brilliant device for puncturing the histrionics of teenage self-absorption (in Richard's case) or the potentially sorry spectacle of Sid's (and to a lesser extent Nat's) drunkenness in the Fourth of July celebrations.

But there are levels of seriousness beneath the pratfalls, beautifully exposed by Essie's inability to name things that disturb her - whether it be Richard's reading (Wilde, Beaudelaire, the Rubaiyat) or the continuing problem of alcohol amongst the menfolk. And though Richard's outbursts are essentially adolescent tantrums born out of frustrated disgust with social mores and intoxication with racy ideas from literature, there is no escaping the knowledge that these can easily grow into monstrous adult egotism. The ever-present O'Neill figure, often wearily mimicking Richard's nervy and immature gestures and even mouthing his lines, shows us the connection. The 'comedy' lies in the fact that the family is basically harmonious instead of dysfunctional, and the teenager's idealism is looked at fondly rather than cynically.

The cast is excellent. George Mackay brilliantly conveys the restlessness and emotional volatility of a youngster at odds with his world, his great spouts of verbal pyrotechnics matched by physical awkwardness - the twitchings of what now would be classified as ADHD. Janie Dee shows us a mother bemused by this gifted but problematic child, someone with a firm hand and a solid idea of how a household should function (despite a weakness in controlling a wayward Irish maidservant) - the sort of dependable mother figure completely missing from O'Neill's own childhood. Her prudishness is not risible - it is touching. Martin Marquez shows Nat to be a decent man by his own lights, and someone Richard ultimately respects and loves underneath the fireworks; there is a tender rapport between them at the end of the play which is brief but deeply moving. The supporting cast - Richard's siblings, some neighbours and a seedy bartender and callgirl - are well played (the latter pair could so easily have been mere caricatures), while the quiet desperation of the subplot in which Lily Miller consistently refuses to marry Sid Davis provides a poignant counterpoint to the main story.