Writer: Eugene O’Neill
Director: Rebecca Frecknall
Rebecca Frecknall has had some success advocating for the less frequently performed works of major American dramatists and there must be high hopes that her latest ‘find,’ Eugene O’Neill’s Moon for the Misbegotten, a sequel of sorts to the monumental Long Day’s Journey Into Night, will have the same impact as her production of Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke. Both are built around a couple who miss their opportunity to love one another, from which the tragedy of the play and their lives stems, but despite fine performances, this patchy interpretation of O’Neill’s verbose piece never finds the tempo that Frecknall is famous for, or the combustible chemistry of great love lost.
Living alone on their farm with her drunken Irish father Phil, Josie secretly pines for landlord and friend James ‘Jim’ Tyrone, also an alcoholic. When the possibility arises that the land could be sold to a neighbour in order to evict them, Josie feels betrayed and schemes with her father to trick Jim into compromising himself. Bent on self-destruction, Jim loves Josie as well, so can a night under the moon change everything?
O’Neill’s play is rich with ideas about love, desire and the inability to see individuals as they really are. Both Josie and Jim are characters that others project their ideas onto and who start to act accordingly as a form of protection from revealing their true vulnerability to the world. That is clear in Frecknall’s revival, and Josie’s need to shelter behind her reputation as a fallen woman conceals wells of emotion about her loneliness and fear that are only heightened when her father and the men of the town play along. Likewise, Jim’s constant inebriation is a shield, a trait much discussed before he eventually appears that deters the reckoning with his past which arrives inevitably in the final part of the play; “There is no present or future,” he exclaims, “only the past happening over and over again now.”
The audience believes in these characters and their unacknowledged attraction for one another as they talk about it; however, in Frecknall’s production that doesn’t come alive in their longed-for interaction. Act Two is their big moment together, properly alone for the first time. Like Summer and Smoke, this is the point where Josie and Jim come within a breath of getting everything they ever wanted but just miss one another. Yet the jeopardy of that, the souring of their chance, the reality of Jim’s self-destruction pulling against Josie’s desire to nurture and save gets lost in all the words. We are told it, but we never really feel it.
This is just one of those times when all the pieces are in place but don’t fit; Tom Scutt’s layered wooden workhouse design is evocative, Jack Knowles’ lighting is gorgeous, rotating on two tracks to create moonlight and sunrise, and the performances individually are extremely good. Ruth Wilson is excellent as Josie, brash and hard on the outside, obsessed with Jim’s sexual experience with prostitutes and tearing at herself inside as a result while Michael Shannon uses his lithe frame to showcase Jim’s fragility, a man who has given himself over to a world of ghosts and barely wants to escape. David Threlfall, meanwhile, extracts plenty of grouchy comedy as Phil, full of plots, who also loves his daughter more than either of them will acknowledge.
Yet this Moon for the Misbegotten doesn’t hang together; it feels too heavy, the words always in the way of the emotions instead of the route to them, and just when you think it is about to explode into something powerful, the momentum ebbs away.
Runs until 16 August 2025
