Eugene O’Neill’s last play, a powerful and heartbreaking drama of aching loneliness and unrequited love, is given an expressionistic production by Rebecca Frecknall and performed on an ugly messy timbered stage.
A Moon for the Misbegotten, written in 1943 but not staged until 1957, four years after his death, is a sequel to his greatest play, the autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night.
O’Neill wrote A Moon for the Misbegotten to show his “deep pity, forgiveness and understanding” for his elder brother, Jamie. He set the action in 1923, the year when Jamie, nearly blind and mad from too much alcohol, died of cerebral apoplexy.
The action takes place in a run-down pig farm in Connecticut. Phil Rogan and his daughter, Josie, fear that James Tyrone, their landlord, intends to double cross them and sell their farm. They scheme to seduce him and get him into her bed, where compromised, they can then blackmail him.
There are big performances by Ruth Wilson and David Threlfall; but there is also too much shouting and mumbling.
Tyrone knows that Josie is not the whore she pretends to be and respects her far too much to seduce her. What he wants is for her to hear his long confession about his shameful behaviour when his mother died. He is looking for redemption, not sex, and needs a mother substitute, not a lover.
Michael Shannon lives up to Josie’s description of Tyrone as “walking like a dead man behind his own coffin”.
Eugene O’Neill is the first great American playwright, and he has written many memorable plays; but, as always, he talks far too much and for far too long. Three hours is taxing for actors and audience alike.
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