A Moon for the Misbegotten review — Ruth Wilson and Michael Shannon mesmerise in Eugene O’Neill’s stark drama

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

“There’s only tonight, and the Moon, and us,” cries Ruth Wilson’s Josie towards the end of A Moon for the Misbegotten, as she urges Michael Shannon’s Jim, the drink-sodden man before her, to stay. But they both know that’s not true. Their family histories cling to them like wet clay to boots. The question pulsing through Eugene O’Neill’s stark, slow-moving drama is whether they can drop their defences — gruff independence for her, the whiskey bottle for him — long enough to connect with the one person who might actually love them.

It could almost be a romcom, were it written in a different key, and director Rebecca Frecknall and her outstanding cast certainly dig out every nugget of spiky humour in this tale of truculent individuals trapped on a rundown 1920s Connecticut farm. But key to this mesmerising production is the tough honesty to their performances and the subtlety with which they reveal the complexity of their characters. Her staging is funny, yes, but it also dares to be raw, slowly unwrapping an achingly tender piece about three damaged souls.

You don’t need to have seen O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, but if you have, you’ll recognise Jim’s second name — Tyrone — and understand his dysfunctional family inheritance. This play joins the failing actor in his forties as years of boozing and bitter self-loathing are taking their toll. He’s landlord to tenant farmer Phil — the brilliant David Threlfall — who is similarly steeped in hooch, and Josie, Phil’s only remaining child (the others having hightailed it out of there), who hides her heart behind a fabricated reputation for promiscuity. When they think Jim might sell the farm, father and daughter concoct a ramshackle plan for her to seduce and shame him. The agonising irony is that Josie and Jim really care for one another, though neither dares to admit it.

The play takes its sweet time to arrive at that final crucial encounter, but when it does, it’s worth it. By then we’ve seen, in Shannon and Wilson’s beautifully layered, deeply poignant performances, just why letting go is so hard. In Shannon’s magnetic Jim, we sometimes glimpse the charm and wit that might have dazzled Broadway, were he not consumed by guilt and shame. He’s as unpredictable as a cat, still and suave one moment, stumbling and self-pitying the next.

Wilson, meanwhile, is exquisitely precise, her character hiding behind the rough persona she has constructed, prickly as a cactus. She stomps about the farm, brandishing a cudgel, but in moments alone her face crumples and softens, her body sagging with exhaustion, revealing the cost of keeping up the fight. The great sadness is that she believes she’s unlovable, though both Jim and her father are devoted to her. The way she cradles the sleeping Jim speaks volumes about the longing and loss that scars them both.

Tom Scutt’s set casts them adrift in a chaotic timber yard, where the long ladders reaching towards the sky seem to mock their stunted hopes, while Jack Knowles’ lighting sends the Moon tracking around them like a searchlight. It’s a tougher watch than Frecknall’s gorgeously poetic productions of Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar and Summer and Smoke — it’s a very different play — but it shares with them a compassionate understanding of human frailty.

★★★★☆

To August 16, almeida.co.uk