16 hours ago
A Moon for the Misbegotten
It's a trap, almost, to think of Eugene O'Neill's final play A Moon for the Misbegotten as a sequel to his miserable masterpiece Long Day's Journey Into Night. Sure, they share the character of Jim Tyrone, a dissolute young actor in Long Day's Journey and a dissolute older actor here. But you go in expecting despair and instead find something that's more like an episode of Steptoe and Son.
Maybe that's down to director Rebecca Frecknall – now a master of whipping the lesser-revived plays of the American canon into shape – putting space between this and the old workhorse of Long Day's Journey (which we've seen three times in London in the last 13 years): not the faded grandeur of a seaside home here, but a wooden yard full of splintered timbers pointing into the sky, messy and dusty.
The production itself, though, is anything but dusty. From the first moment, every line is a punch or a jab or a dagger. Peter Corboy and Ruth Wilson as siblings Mike and Josie burst onto the stage and whack each other with dialogue, and their fists. Fed up with his dad Phil's drunkenness and slave-driving on their rock-infested farm, Mike is leaving. All that's left to Phil is daughter Josie, whose sleeping around has made her 'the scandal of the neighbourhood', and their landlord Jim Tyrone who may or may not sell the farm to them and who may or may not be in love with Josie.
David Threlfall is a hoot as Phil, roaring and whimpering, and giving us some hilarious line deliveries. It's surprising just how funny these early scenes are, especially the exchanges between Josie and Phil, the two of them as roguish and stubborn as each other, like two blunt instruments.
But what this does share with Long Day's Journey, and with all of O'Neill's best work, is the seven or eight layers of contradictory meaning that each line hides, and a cast full of characters who can't tell themselves the truth. Here, they are all bent on believing they are the worst versions of themselves: Josie that she's a whore, Jim that he's a drunk, Phil that he's got no heart. Like L ong Day's Journey, the play becomes an excavation until the characters have dug themselves down to bare rock.
Clapping her hands, slapping castmates' shoulders, Wilson plays Josie with an almost hoedown physicality that's impossible not to watch. It takes Josie the longest to pick apart the shell that entombs her, and Wilson shows us someone so shored up with defence mechanisms that every movement and every word has become a careful act - though it's sometimes too fine a line to tell whether it's Wilson acting or Josie acting.
Stick that alongside Michael Shannon's sloth-like slowness, and it's like the quick and the dead: him sharp-suited and sluggish, her in rags and restless; her playful ribbing a world apart from his instant, unrelenting severity. Even his mouth seems reluctant to open too widely, and that complete lack of hurrying is completely engrossing. My god the man has presence.
Frecknall handles it brilliantly: she knows how to let the humour ebb away, how to let the anguish build. Maybe there's a bit too much whisky-swilling and moonlight melodrama, but even when O'Neill's text sags, the production holds it up with fine-wrought acting or slowly circling lights or heartrending stage pictures, like Shannon doubled over in agony while Wilson holds him tightly to her. As she did with Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke, Frecknall turns the tilth on a half-buried play, and digs up something extraordinary.
