A Moon for the Misbegotten

During the summer of 2025, a high-profile production of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten was mounted at the small Almeida Theatre in Islington, north London. It was directed by Rebecca Frecknall, who has emerged as a major force in British theater over recent years, thanks to her stellar, Olivier-winning productions of Cabaret (starring Jessie Buckley and Eddie Redmayne) and A Streetcar Named Desire (starring Paul Mescal, Anjana Vasan, and Patsy Ferran). Frecknall’s consummate skills as a director were evident in her production of O’Neill’s late, powerful, semiautobiographical work in which he reflects on the end of his brother Jamie’s life. The actors had been coached well in terms of how to handle key, extended speeches, especially in terms of rhythms and inflections; and the blocking and choreography were often clever. But, despite the fine direction and the actors turning in skillful performances, the production was—as I will explain further below—hampered by curious casting choices and an awkward stage set from Tom Scutt that Frecknall and the actors had to work hard to accommodate.The three main cast members—Ruth Wilson, David Threlfall, and Michael Shannon—are well known and well respected. Wilson, who played Josie Hogan, has stunned television audiences with her brilliant performances in series such as The Woman in the Wall (2023) (which she also produced), The Affair (2014–19), A Very Royal Scandal (2024), and the BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre (2006). And theater audiences on both sides of the Atlantic have been dazzled by her Tony-and Olivier-nominated star turns in major productions, including O’Neill’s “Anna Christie” (2011). Readers familiar with Wilson’s screen and stage work will already be marveling at the idea of the 5-feet 6-inch actor (who is in no way plus size) being cast as Josie. After all, O’Neill describes the character in the stage directions as being:Josie’s size and intimidating presence is routinely commented on by characters. When someone as relatively small as Wilson plays the role, these lines seem odd. One could argue that the lines indicate the patriarchal view of women’s bodies—i.e., the tendency to regard any normal-sized woman as big. But Josie’s size and strength are central to her characterization and how she carries herself in the world—in her assaulting and mothering of other male characters and in her sense that men might be ashamed to desire her sexually. As such, the role is much better suited to an actor who is both larger and less conventionally attractive than Wilson.All that said, Wilson’s handling of the role was supremely impressive. She carried herself in a way that suggested she was strong and regarded herself as excessively large. Vocally, she handled the changes of register between humor, pathos, menace, shame, and seductiveness in Josie’s lines with awe-inspiring deftness. As for her accent, dialect coach Rebecca Clark Carey wisely advised her (as well as actor Peter Corboy, who played the minor role of Josie’s brother, Mike), to employ a rough-and-tumble American accent underpinned by Irish inflections and cadences. Neither Wilson nor Corboy tried for a specifically New England accent that might approximate the setting in rural Connecticut but instead stuck to something more pan-American. I was grateful that they did not commit the error that many British and Irish actors do when playing a white, working-class American character: default to a “New Yawk” or to a “down home” half-Southern, half-midwestern accent. Indeed, thanks to her powerful vocal work and her handling of the character’s journey, Wilson was probably the best Josie I have ever seen, despite being physically ill-suited to the role—at least as envisaged by O’Neill.Josie’s father, Phil, was played by English stage and screen legend Threlfall. He was presumably chosen because of his track record of playing either Irish characters (such as Samuel Beckett in a highly memorable episode of the TV series Urban Myths) or British characters of Irish descent (such as arguably his most famous role, that of Frank Gallagher in the original UK version of the TV series Shameless). As one would expect, Threlfall did an excellent job of embodying Phil’s slippery physicality, as well as his “Irish mental flexibility” (to borrow a phrase from Bernard Shaw). However, once again, based on the script, O’Neill felt that Phil’s size was a key aspect of his character. The playwright tells us that he is “five feet six” with “stumpy” legs and “short” arms (862). The association between that diminutive size and his sly scheming is behind his much-taller daughter’s repeated references to him as a “little buck goat” (862) and a “crazy old billy goat” (893) who is up to mischief. Because Threlfall is a little over six feet tall, these lines sounded nonsensical—despite Threlfall doing his best to adopt a stooping, low-to-the-ground manner. As regards accent, he, Clark Carey, and Frecknall were attempting to acknowledge O’Neill’s two references to Phil being from County Donegal (876, 909). Alas, Threlfall’s attempts to put on a Donegal accent were mixed. At times he sounded like Donegal country singer Daniel O’Donnell, but more often his voice wavered between a muted impression of Scottish comedian Billy Connolly and a clichéd, pan-West of Ireland “culchie” accent. This is not to take away from the overall excellence of Threlfall’s performance; it is just that an actual, short Donegal actor—someone like Little John Nee—would have been better suited to the role if accent was to be important.On the surface, Michael Shannon, the Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated actor playing Josie’s love interest, James Tyrone Jr., would seem to be an example of ideal casting. Not only is Shannon Irish American, but he was also nominated for a Tony Award for his performance as James Tyrone Jr. in a 2016 Broadway production of O’Neill’s other late play based on his family history, Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Even if his performance at the Almeida was not as strong as his work in films such as Revolutionary Road (2008) and Nocturnal Animals (2016), Shannon still had moments of brilliance. If there was a weakness, it was that he portrayed Jim’s “death in life” state a little too obviously from the start. In my reading of the script, in act 1, Jim—while certainly not his “old self”—is still able to project his slightly oily but ultimately winning charm to those he likes or wants to manipulate. A certain “vagueness” and “absent-mindedness” (907) only starts to become obvious at moments in act 2. Finally, Jim’s “death mask” (927) expression begins to make its appearance from act 3 onwards. Shannon (perhaps under instruction from Frecknall) had the audience thinking that Jim was dead inside from the start of the piece. Nevertheless, when Shannon did stir to life on occasion (whether to yell or lament or get loving or lustful), he was fantastic and compelling to watch.The trainspotter in me would complain that Shannon did not pronounce “Donegal” correctly and that none of the actors pronounced “Tyrone” with the authentically Irish pronunciation that a real-life Phil Hogan would have used (TER-OWN). While one could excuse the Irish American characters for going with the usual American pronunciation of that name and Irish county (TYE-RONE), it is lamentable that such little niceties were overlooked in a play so concerned with Irish Catholic sexual repression and cultural baggage.While the performances by the main actors had their strengths and Corboy and Akie Kotabe (as T. Stedman Harder) were sufficiently strong in their minor roles, the performers’ jobs were made much harder by the production’s awkward set. Designer Tom Scutt decided to forgo any attempt to create a realistic-looking house/homestead. Instead, there was a circular wooden stage space with a raised platform for Josie’s room, which—contrary to O’Neill’s script—was exposed to the audience throughout the show. When characters were meant to enter other parts of the house or travel to and from the barn, they would descend from the main wooden circle down to the auditorium’s floor level and enter a sort of semiveiled passageway that surrounded the large, wooden circle, with our view of them slightly obscured by random wooden planks and step ladders, many lined up against the theater’s back walls. From there they would disappear either through a wooden door (upstage right) or under Josie’s bedroom (upstage center). Because the set gave no coherent sense of an actual house and there was no suggestion (besides the presence of one pitchfork) that a farmyard was near to hand, we audience members could just as easily have been looking at a squat in an old, urban factory. Perhaps Scutt was trying to ensure that we would know this was not a conventional farmhouse but rather a “shanty,” as the script confirms (860, 944). However, the resulting staging was confusing, given that, when someone wanted to enter the house, they sometimes ascended the platform that led to Josie’s bedroom (and had to stay up there) and sometimes made a big show of descending some stairs (downstage right) to enter the weird recess—trellised by long planks and stepladders—that ran beneath and alongside the main stage platform.While the stage set might have had its issues, the scenography was redeemed by a strong lighting design from Jack Knowles: he placed a circular batten above the stage with a spotlight that circumnavigated it, representing the moon with its ever-shifting positioning and its varying luminescence. The costumes from designer Moi Tran and the sound design from Peter Rice, augmented by soundscapes composed by Sian O’Gorman’s NYX collective and featuring a mix of keyboard drones and “human breath” choruses, were also excellent.It is always rewarding to see what top-level theater makers and actors will do when given the opportunity to stage one of O’Neill’s works. As such, I found the Almeida’s 2025 production of A Moon for the Misbegotten to be an absorbing theatrical experience, noteworthy for some great direction and high-quality acting and design. Alas, the decision to ignore some of O’Neill’s stipulations regarding the stature/build of characters and the stage set ultimately kept this from being a knockout production.