Review: A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN, Almeida

We are in an American provincial backwater. Characters bursting with steamy yearning squashed into the intimacy of the Almedia so close you’d think you can smell the bourbon on their hot breath. A pinch of expressionist flare as garnish and you have the Rebecca Frecknall formula: Summer and Smoke, Streetcar, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This time the director takes on a lesser-known Eugene O’Neill. If it isn’t broke don’t fix it?

Irish-American Josie Hogan is the last of her siblings left on the family farm. The others have taken flight to find their fortune. From the get-go we can sense that her proto-feminist bravado masks a deep-seated loneliness sternly but soulfully played by a perma-scowling Ruth Wilson. Tom Scutt’s set of frayed wooden panels evokes the tangled shards of a spider’s web trapping her. A chorus of crickets hums in the background.

Along with her grizzled alcoholic father Phil, they concoct a scheme to ensnare the fortune of their landowner, perpetually feverish James Tyrone (who features in Long Day’s Journey Into Night), haunted with guilt over his mother's death and anchored by apathy for a world he doesn’t fit into.

It culminates in a breathless third act, Tyrone and Josie slalom around each other throwing flirtatious taunts like boxers hurling punches before springing back to maintain their defence. She becomes a surrogate mother coddling Tyrone’s sweaty head on her thigh. He becomes her ticket out of economic hardship. They exchange heavy glares searching for solace, desperate dreams blurring into a swamp of trauma and bleeding melancholy. But the realisation that there is more to love than mutual convenience begins to dawn. Plans and schemes fracture into dust.

A Moon for the Misbegotten never quite tugs at the heartstrings - partly because we never truly believe that Hogan and Tyrone could make their inevitably doomed love work. Their emotionally blunt declarations are dulled by a perfunctory malaise, and only enabled by copious whiskey consumption. If the trajectory was less predictably bleak, the three-hour runtime might reel us in more.

Instead, you sit back and let the casts’ quiet power envelope you in their grip. It could be a masterclass for Wilson as Hogan and Michael Shannon’s tragically magnetic Tyrone. Lanky and gangly, his vulpine charm melts into giddy freneticism as his inner schoolboy is released like a fist unclenching. They say all men need therapy. Here’s one that certainly does.

Frecknall’s trademark lucid expressionism heightens their ambient longing, a lone lantern circles the stage, an omnipresent moon showering them in icy light. But it’s not enough to redeem one of O’Neill’s more cumbersome plays, in need of streamlining to match the soul piercing eroticism of her other directorial offerings. A strong production subdued by the limitations of the play.

A Moon for the Misbegotten plays at the Almeida until 16 August