“A Moon for the Misbegotten” at Almeida Theatre
Jeremy Malies in North London
29 June 2025
James Tyrone Jr is a young actor showing promise despite ill-discipline and a rackety social life in Eugene O’Neill’s signature work Long Day’s Journey into Night. Here, in Rebecca Frecknall’s faithful direction of the sequel play A Moon for the Misbegotten, Tyrone Jr reappears and is played by Michael Shannon.
Michael Shannon as Tyrone Jr.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
I’m a sucker for seeing characters have a second life in a subsequent play. And here, it’s all the neater and almost metatheatrical that Shannon did indeed played Tyrone Jr in Long Day’s Journey into Night nine years ago on Broadway where he earned a Tony nomination. He could easily win an Olivier here, but I found this to be a disappointing project.
Shannon did a lot to sustain my fitful interest in a largely inert production of a play that O’Neill trialled in Midwestern cities in 1947 before (unhappy with development potential) asking for it to be shelved. The piece was not premiered until 1957 (in New York) with the playwright having been dead for four years.
The female lead here is Ruth Wilson as Tyrone Jr’s love interest, Josie Hogan. Something of an O’Neill specialist, Wilson has won an Olivier playing the title character in Anna Christie opposite Jude Law.
As with the earlier play, we are in Irish-dominated Connecticut but now on a hardscrabble inland farm. The creaky plot has Tyrone Jr as landlord to tenant farmer Phil Hogan played by David Threlfall. The play sees O’Neill making serious points about the precarious position of tenant farmers and the rural poor. Hogan lives in fear that the temperamental Tyrone Jr will sell to unlikeable local grandee, T. Steadman Harder, who is given a brio-filled turn by Akie Kotabe as an egotistical spiv.
David Threlfall and Ruth Wilson.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
The production opens with an unimpressive sequence. Wilson and Peter Corboy (playing Josie’s brother Mike) fail to bond or produce meaningful quarrels (fight director Sam Lyon-Behan) in a scene where Mike decides to quit the farm. In his characteristically prolix stage directions, O’Neill says that he envisages Josie as five feet eleven inches and 180 pounds. Being nowhere near this stature, even the resourceful Wilson fails in the extended scenes of horseplay with Corboy which Frecknall should have reined in.
Much of the evening is similarly inert though there are scenes when the dialogue between Wilson and Shannon takes wing. These stem from Hogan’s determination to secure his position at the farm by having the alcoholic Tyrone Jr get so plastered that he will allow himself to be discovered in bed with Josie and compromised into a shotgun marriage. Threlfall impresses as he shows his character veering between bumbling heavy-drinking yokel and shrewd schemer with no principles.
As Shannon and Wilson court in the moonlight there is a significant plot reveal about Josie’s sexual history. Shannon’s acting is prodigious as he conveys his character’s agonies on nights when the quarts of illegal bourbon (it’s 1923 and three years into Prohibition) fail to soothe or sedate him and leave him in limbo. I thought of another lost soul, Brick, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof seeking the “click” in his head.
The thing that I concede O’Neill does well is addiction, from Tyrone Jr’s bourbon-slugging here to the doomed barflies in The Iceman Cometh to the mother’s morphine habit in Long Day’s Journey. Shannon’s acting is first-rate as he rises to the challenge of portraying a drunken man who can still quote meaningfully from Horace, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, and even Ernest Dowson.
There are odd technical decisions. Lighting by Jack Knowles features two near-Brechtian instances of a spotlight running around the circular playing area on a rail, almost like a cinematic dolly shot. This may have been a reference to the moon’s path or perhaps the second instance is Tyrone Jr’s addled wits recalling theatre lighting from his modest stage career? At the finale, Knowles uses filters to generate a sunrise that is a scattered medley from saffron to tangerine.
Frecknall and set designer Tom Scutt have the main action taking place on a raised disc. Phil and Josie’s clapboard living quarters with several windowpanes missing sit behind, and Scutt shows how distressed the area is. Scutt and Knowles combine to present Josie’s bedroom as a blanked-out space. This is symbolic just as she reveals an important aspect of her sexual history. Wilson gains momentum from the revelation for quite a few minutes in her character’s unsubtle flirting with Shannon. Behind them, Knowles contrives to create shadows that suggest the agricultural machinery outside is enormous and a little scary.
The gear change is temporary but there are of course achingly tender moments. Wilson is convincing as her character says that quick repartee does not protect you from emotional inarticulacy. I sensed Irish mythology kicking in, with Wilson throwing up a line of Irish heroines back to Deirdre of the Sorrows as envisaged by J. M. Synge. And that line comes forward to the plays of Brian Friel and Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane.
The thing that saddens me about Wilson here is that I believe her thought process as to playing a giantess of a woman has seen her flatten and broaden her usual subtle expressions and gestures. Meanwhile, Shannon is acquiring subtly as he shows his character (a serial user of prostitutes) realizing that there has to be a middle ground between binary notions of women as either whores or a Madonna. Frecknall’s direction here is strong as she threads the many levels of plotting by father and daughter through the heightened duologue section between the lovers.
But this is an odd over-cautious note for Frecknall to strike as she leaves the Almeida to be an associate director at the Old Vic. And it was a long night such that I jotted down Tyrone’s words, “There is no present or future – only the past happening over and over again – now. You can’t get away from it.” I admire the creative team for presenting this in the exact format that O’Neill intended save for Wilson’s physique. But the production is as glacial as the ice pond in which Threlfall’s character is constantly threatening to drown himself.
