'A Moon for the Misbegotten' review — Ruth Wilson and Michael Shannon are heart-wrenching in Eugene O'Neill’s rarely seen play

Read our review of A Moon for the Misbegotten, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, now in performances at the Almeida Theatre to 16 August.

What a treat to get a production of Eugene O’Neill’s rarely seen A Moon for the Misbegotten so soon after a West End revival of its better-known and more often staged companion play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, which ran last year starring Brian Cox. Long Day’s Journey is a prequel to Misbegotten, and its character Jamie Tyrone (who O’Neill modelled on his own brother) resurfaces in the latter as Jim Tyrone. For those seeing the two plays in relatively quick succession, it's a chance to watch Jamie/Jim grow from young man raging at his father to farm landlord, ruined by a potent mix of whisky, grief and guilt since the death of his mother.

Director Rebecca Frecknall – whose reputation was honed in this same theatre staging the works of O’Neill’s contemporary Tennessee Williams – takes an almost painstaking amount of care to infuse meaning into every word, glance and touch here, and after a while, the many pregnant pauses (which are partly responsible for its three-hour run time) start to feel laboured. Clarity loses a foothold in the play’s dense scheming and knotty double-crossing, meaning revelations of trickery don’t always smack as hard as they might. But this production is padded with star power, courtesy of Ruth Wilson, Michael Shannon and David Threllfall, each of whom delivers a performance worthy of their reputation.

Really, not a great deal happens in Misbegotten. It’s a relatively static play where its trio of central characters relay anecdotes about their pasts and their shenanigans outside of each other’s company. That’s very much the point – few stories capture how personal baggage can stand in the way of a could-be happy relationship like this one.

On a Connecticut farm, aging Irish farmer Phil Hogan (Threllfall) labours with his boyish daughter Josie (Wilson). And the barrage of insults through which they communicate is a thin veil for the affection, or at least dependance, they have on one another. Jim (Shannon) is not a regular landlord, he’s a cool landlord, stopping by for drinks and muscling in on the pair’s aggressive humour or guffawing at their cunning. But he could sell their farm behind their backs, which prompts Phil and Josie to hatch a plan involving Josie getting Jim into bed, then blackmailing him.

Matters don’t unfold as expected though, and the play hinges on its devastating third act, where Jim and Josie try but struggle to get close, with Jim’s compliments bouncing off Josie’s shield of self-hatred, and his drunkenness, fuelled by a stomach-turning amount of Scotch, sabotaging any potential for real intimacy.

Wilson is luminous as Josie. With an American accent laced with traces of its Irish roots, her early teeth-baring and puffed-up bravado dissolves into a heart-wrenching puddle of insecurity and maternal longing in the moonlit company of Jim. Shannon’s by turns gently compassionate and sourly self-pitying Jim brings welcome physicality, his stumbles and nuzzling betraying his helplessness. And Threllfall’s gruff Donegal-bred Phil gradually reveals his complexity.

On Tom Scutt’s simply dressed set, where there is not a great deal to engage visually beyond a wall of farm tools, the trio’s self-conscious movements carry all the more weight. But it’s a trick involving Jack Knowles’s spotlight orbiting the stage as a low-hanging moon that has the most optical impact, framing the should-be couple in their tortured embrace and offering a momentary glimmer of what might have been.

A Moon for the Misbegotten is at the Almeida Theatre to 16 August.

Photo credit: A Moon for the Misbegotten (Photos by Marc Brenner)