Review by Simon Jenner, June 27th 2025
Three hours-five where nothing happens, and everything, in this spell-binding production. Literally: not a breath till a standing-ovation roar. Eugene O’Neill’s not often figured as redemptive, still less one quarrying explicit Catholic themes from a faith he’d long abandoned. But his last completed play A Moon for the Misbegotten, from 1943, is suffused with the same theme as Poulenc’s 1955 opera Dialogues des Carmelites. Someone taking on another’s fear and suffering, exchanging it for their own strength. ‘Transference of Grace’ is pretty esoteric; but at the end of the mesmerising third act you believe in the gift. At least on a human scale. Though featuring a common character, A Moon for the Misbegotten – here directed at the Almeida till August 16th by its outgoing Associate Director Rebecca Frecknall – is only obliquely a huge pendant to O’Neill’s family-infused masterpiece Long’s Day’s Journey into Night. Though redemption touches both. And it’s surprisingly funny.
Ruth Wilson and David Threlfall. Photo Credit: Marc Brenner
It’s 1923. Ruth Wilson’s Josie Hogan centres everything and is scarcely off the stage. Wilson slowly unpeels Josie’s hard-talking, hard-scrabble homestead demeanour; to reveal empathy, love, forgiveness over the first three acts. At the start she’s dungaree’d, jabs at her gormless younger brother Mike Hogan (Peter Corboy) who flurries with boyish gawp at Josie’s cajoling him to join their two other brothers in fleeing. She steals him money from their father (who’s later impressed) and Mike’s seen no more. Wilson’s thrilling voltage is a foil to her later, hushed intensity. In that sense A Moon’s almost operatic.
Their father Phil (David Threlfall) is a miracle of skirl, scowl and hilarity. Family exchanges are uproarious as they plot and counterplot advantage. Does Phil in fact want Josie to match with their landlord James for sentimental as well as the pragmatic reason of keeping their farm? And why does he cross and double-cross everyone? Josie’s responses are surprising. Why too does Josie exalt her sexual freedom, when the truth is elsewhere? She has the courage though to self-define and defy.
Wilson and Threlfall engage in high-velocity badinage, sharply accented (thick with Threlfall but lucid) along an almost ritual path. That ritual doesn’t get any less when others arrive. The very fact you can see it’s language games allows wild outbursts of humour.
That’s emphatically the case when landlord James Tyrone (Michael Shannon) enters quoting Horace in Latin, then Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Gabriel Rosetti and ends on Ernest Dowson. He’s a hack ex-actor in his father’s wake, the amount of poetry he feels it necessary to cite seems like a man reaching for a language only possessed at second-hand: a twitching drunk’s reflex. But in reciting all this, playing the aesthete, James is almost part of this family.
That’s what makes this work so achingly close to happiness. An alcoholic, like O’Neill’s elder brother whose last year this is, he’s about six years younger than James was; and semi-fictional James and Josie echo an earlier affair. Shannon, threading a molecule-wide tightrope between faded elegance and outright drunk, shudders out of the laconic, and into the luminous in James. It’s reflected in Wilson’s radiance. With James’ unflinching self-recognition to match Josie’s, the two joke of their attraction, place lust in quotation marks, with Josie pretending to a promiscuity she’s never enjoyed. Meanwhile James hugs self-loathing guilt like a protective blanket.
Here, though some parts of real brother James are lifted verbatim, the transformations of Josie’s character build her into someone transcending her world: though stuck in it. There is too a deeply disturbing undercurrent of misogyny, with the inevitable madonna/whore syndrome; and women referred to as “tarts” and “pigs”; especially when literal pigs are invoked elsewhere.
Dramaturgically, A Moon is a little unbalanced and you wonder if the drama (trialled in 1947, then languishing till 1957) might have been edited. O’Neill was no longer up to this by then. Since though there’s five characters it’s almost a three-hander with two walk-on parts: thus already the sparsest of O’Neil’s full-length plays. The two brief characters lend momentum and context though it’s a luxury. The second, T Stedman Harder (Akie Kotabe, all nervous entitlement), also adds spice to a crowd-feel in Act One that never arrives. His unwelcome attentions – he’s trying to buy out James and eject the Hogans – are comical, and show the family’s anarchic fury, even violence. But again it ends as with Mike, an almost whimsical episode with cattle-prod.
Unlike other Frecknall productions here, there’s a bit more suggestion of set: Tom Scutt counterpoints the Almeida’s écorché brickwork with an exposed farmhouse; and a bleached-out intimacy for Josie’s bedroom. Elsewhere it’s burdened with planks and ladders. It’s intriguingly lit with (at the end of each act) two swinging arc-lamps of a moon by Jack Knowles; that emerges from the wings like the light of an oncoming express train. You briefly fear you’re somewhere in Anna Karenina. Moi Tan’s costumes point up the lime-green flame of Ruth Wilson’s dress out of the dungarees, rumpled browns and blacks. Peter Rice’s sound diffuses NYX’s composition, lapping like a liminal banshee.
Threlfall excels as the mischievous sprite around the central couple. But it’s Wilson above all, and Shannon who compel us to watch transfixed as every ache and spasm of James’ guilt is nursed and sweated out of him, like poison drawn with the alcohol both ply each other with. Mutual recognition is so close, so often declared, you can’t believe they might miss. And in a sense they don’t: everything’s finally said and released. But they also recognise what James needs What Josie accepts – not needs – is something else. And the next morning you fear carapaces are buckled back on, armoured against hurt. Even here though, O’Neill surprises.
A troubled, troubling masterpiece, it’s still an exalted end to O’Neill’s career, before illness overtook him. Frecknall’s intervened far less than normal. I almost wish she might have done something radical, though the two extra characters amplify humour. And we might have been left with a broken music. Act Three alone yields the most heart-rending, tender, quietly explosive acting of the year. An outstanding, unmissable production.
Casting Director Julie Horan CDG, Costume Supervisor Olivia Ward, Dialect Coach Rebecca Clark-Carey, Fight Director Sam Lyon-Behan, Associate Director Taiwo Lizzie Manwaring, Set Design Assistants David Allen, Richard Henley, George Sanger, Eleanor Wintour.
Michael Shannon and Ruth Wilson. Photo Credit: Marc Brenner
