Synopsis Set in 1923 Connecticut, the play explores the tormented and alcoholic James Tyrone, who finds solace one moonlit night in the healing arms of the shy, virginal Josie Hogan. Possessed by the memory of his dead mother and guilt ridden by his own blasphemous behaviour, the doomed Tyrone is the only man Josie will ever really know.
After five months of darkness, the premature closure of Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues and acres of negative media coverage about Kevin Spacey’s tenure as artistic director, the Old Vic needed a hit. And it got one resoundingly last night (26 September 2006, previews from 15 September) when Howard Davies’s new production of Eugene O’Neill’s 1947 American classic A Moon for the Misbegotten, starring Olivier Award winner Eve Best opposite Spacey himself, opened.
Josie (Best), a towering woman with a quick tongue and a ruined reputation, lives in a dilapidated Connecticut farmhouse with her conniving father, Phil Hogan (Meaney). Together they’re a formidable force as they scrape together a livelihood. But Josie’s softer side is exposed through her love of Jim Tyrone (Spacey), Hogan’s landlord and drinking buddy, a third-rate actor whose dreams of stardom were washed away by alcohol. One night, they find solace in each others’ arms, and their true feelings are revealed.
Overnight critics were unanimous in their praise of the production, with all awarding four stars and commenting the play could mark a turn-around in the fortunes of the Old Vic, following its damning reviews for Resurrection Blues and subsequent summer closure. They were highly impressed with the performances of Best and Spacey in particular, mooting them for accolades in the forthcoming awards season.
Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage.com (4 stars) – “In this tremendous, riveting revival…. Eve Best makes no attempt to play the ‘ugly overgrown lump of a woman’ of the stage directions. The performance irradiates outwards, transfiguring the physical realities of appearance in spiritual revelation. The same applies to Phil, whom Colm Meaney presents not as the usual gruff, wizened old Irish bugger… but as a beacon of irascible, paternal decency lit up from within…. The scene is then set for the third act moonlit encounter where two lost souls are released in forgiveness as Jamie recounts his guilt and shame at sleeping with a $50 whore on the train bearing his mother’s coffin back east. Jamie is redeemed, but so is Josie, who acquires a maternal, mythical role while cradling the human wreckage in her capacious lap. It is one of the most affecting pietas in modern drama…. Best… plays every scene for its full emotional worth, and fills the stage with resonating goodness without setting our teeth on edge (always the danger with this role). And Spacey… inhabits Jamie without fuss and with the true understanding of an actor who gets under the skin of a flawed character and shows how he battles with demons and teeters on the edge of the abyss. A great play is restored with great acting.”
Michael Billington in the Guardian (4 stars) – “The highlight of the Spacey regime to date…. Eve Best makes no pretence at being the ungainly, 180-lb figure O'Neill describes in his stage directions. Instead, her Josie is a hard-working rustic slave who has grown used to hiding her feelings and who deflects every compliment with a shy, nervous laugh. It is a beautiful performance, about the pain of living a constant lie, perfectly matched by Spacey's Jim…. Above all, Spacey reminds you that Tyrone is a one-time actor who masks his self-loathing under the carapace of the constant drinker. Spacey grasps each glass of bourbon like a drowning man and even flinches when offered water. But the brilliance of his performance is its suggestion that even this is a public act designed to hide the remorse he feels over his shameful behaviour when accompanying his mother's funeral coffin. Watching Best and Spacey together is like seeing two desperate people stripping their souls naked. Bob Crowley's ramshackle rural set and Colm Meaney's self-deceptive Hogan lend weight to a production that offers that rarest of theatrical treats: an evening of raw, powerful emotion.”
Benedict Nightingale in the Times (4 stars) - “Howard Davies’ revival, with Kevin Spacey and Eve Best ablaze at its epicentre, is both a major triumph and, inevitably, a bit of a failure. It proves impossible to disguise that the play is an awkward mix of rustic laugh-in and searing confessional, but it’s equally impossible to miss the force of the long denouement that only O’Neill had the passion and power to create. In the half-dark, the two protagonists do what O’Neill characters find so difficult. They shed their protective masks and ditch their life-lies. Josie’s pretence is that she’s hard, mean and slatternly when, as she now reveals, she’s actually virginal and vulnerable. Spacey’s disguise is subtler, deeper: he’s a sensitive man escaping from pain and remorse in a mix of cynicism and booze…. It’s hard to believe the self-disgust that Spacey brings to the confessional; but then his whole performance, like Best’s, is superb. From the moment he trudges on stage, you feel you’re seeing a dead man walking…. Is there better acting to be found anywhere? I’d be surprised.”
Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph - “A hit was desperately required. Fortunately, that's exactly what the theatre has achieved with this tremendous, often shatteringly powerful production…. The dramatist's last play brings together the dream O'Neill team of Spacey, Best and Davies… It… wrenches the heart like few other 20th-century dramas…. Jim was based on O'Neill's own brother, and the role offers an actor a chance to interpret one of the most harrowing, and accurate, portraits of alcoholism ever written. Spacey seizes all his chances. When we first meet him, his thirst for the booze seems comic, but this extraordinarily charismatic actor gradually lays bare a man enduring a living death…. More movingly still, Eve Best gives one of the most beautiful accounts of aching, unconditional love I have ever seen as she listens to his confessions, cradles his head against her breast, admits to her own long denied virginity and finally, devastatingly, understands that love is sometimes ineffective against the worst horrors of this world…. With strong and often richly comic support from Colm Meaney as Josie's sly old Irish father, atmospheric designs by Bob Crowley and a wonderful score from Dominic Muldowney, this is a show that finally finds the Old Vic crowned in glory.”
Paul Taylor in the Independent - “Spacey the producer has gathered just the right team to do justice to a play that time has proved to be a work of shattering genius…. Howard Davies is the greatest British interpreter of O'Neill. And he has worked before with Eve Best and Kevin Spacey, to massive acclaim, on work by this dramatist…. Spacey's superb performance shows you a man who tries to hide his haunted alcoholic despair behind the jauntily cynical front of a Broadway ‘lad’. As the seemingly tough, joshing tomboy-like Josie, Eve Best in her heart-stopping performance, reveals a woman with a life-giving capacity for love and virginal tenderness who has had to adopt the pose of a promiscuous hoyden…. The actors appear to have achieved the deep rapport experienced by the characters…. The lacerating twist is that, while he understands and loves Josie better than anyone, James incubates a mother-centred self-hatred that prevents them ever achieving lasting happiness…. Here is a man who is a psychological corpse already and, though it destroys everything she had ever wanted, she gives him permission to depart and die. Exquisitely judged in terms of lighting, shifts of mood and undulating pattern of raised and dashed hopes.… This marvellous evening gives one the sense that they have learned by their past mistakes and may go on to a thrilling future.”
Twenty years ago, Kevin Spacey made his West End debut as James Tyrone Jr in A Long Day’s Journey Into Night in a famously quick-on-its-feet production directed by Jonathan Miller, with Jack Lemmon, Spacey’s mentor, as his brutish actor father.
Spacey presented young Jamie as a spitefully chaotic loafer, splintering the usual stereotype of a whoring bully. In this tremendous, riveting revival of Eugene O'Neill’s last play, sparked by the death of O’Neill’s real-life alcoholic brother James in 1923 (the year of the play’s setting, too), Spacey makes peace with the character on his downward, confessional spiral to oblivion on a dilapidated farm in Connecticut.
A Moon for the Misbegotten is indeed a kind of epilogue to Long Day’s Journey, that autobiographical rollercoaster “written in tears and blood”. But it's an altogether more resigned and lyrical piece, classical in composition, intense with emotional significance, bursting with an Irish lilt and swagger jokily implied when Spacey uses his tin pouch as a mock thurible, as if processing down a church aisle instead of a ploughed field.
The farmhouse belongs to Phil Hogan, whose daughter, the slatternly giantess Josie, is the play’s conscience and its anchor. It is a mark of Howard Davies’ production that Eve Best makes no attempt to play the “ugly overgrown lump of a woman” of the stage directions. The performance irradiates outwards, transfiguring the physical realities of appearance in spiritual revelation.
The same applies to Phil, whom Colm Meaney presents not as the usual gruff, wizened old Irish bugger played, for instance, by Roy Dotrice six years ago in a Tony Award-winning performance on Broadway, but as a beacon of irascible, paternal decency lit up from within.
The heightened colouration derives from Bob Crowley’s design, which places the slanting shack of the farmhouse in a tense relationship with both the facing water pump and the sky-bisecting telegraph wires. Spacey first appears in a silhouette, gently swaying into view in a crumpled jacket and battered hat like a showman on the skids.
Peripheral, though not inessential, to the play’s core is the first scene departure of Josie’s brother (Eugene O'Hare) and Phil’s defiant resistance to the cynical blandishments of the millionaire Harder of Standard Oil (Billy Carter). The scene is then set for the third act moonlit encounter where two lost souls are released in forgiveness as Jamie recounts his guilt and shame at sleeping with a $50 whore on the train bearing his mother’s coffin back east. Jamie is redeemed, but so is Josie, who acquires a maternal, mythical role while cradling the human wreckage in her capacious lap. It is one of the most affecting pietas in modern drama.
Eve Best, so memorable as Lavinia in Davies’ 2003 National Theatre production of O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, plays every scene for its full emotional worth, and fills the stage with resonating goodness without setting our teeth on edge (always the danger with this role).
And Spacey, renewing his own O’Neill relationship with Davies after the decisive triumph of The Iceman Cometh (at the Almeida and Old Vic in 1998), inhabits Jamie without fuss and with the true understanding of an actor who gets under the skin of a flawed character and shows how he battles with demons and teeters on the edge of the abyss.
THE MOST REWARDING PURE STIRRING SUPERB THEATRE EXPERIENCE FOR YEARS. LONG LIVE STACEY. - 86.136.188.156)
08 Dec 06
This is as good as it gets. - 70.129.13.127)
05 Dec 06
The best production since Spacey started running the Old Vic combined with his best performance. Eve Best, too, is sensational. - 172.143.182.25)
02 Dec 06
The performances are very good, but the whole thing is about half an hour too long. As someone else wrote, it's a bit of an endurance test. - 86.142.37.115)
29 Nov 06
Despite boasting three sensational performances from Colm Meany, Kevin Spacey and, especially, Eve Best, there is still a slight doubt about Spacey's choice of plays for the Old Vic.
Moon deals with the uncovering of true feelings: why Tyrone fell off the wagon so spectacularly; why Josie is prepared to be known as the town slut rather than deal with the pain of being a "big, ugly cow" (which Best clearly is not); and the father's real motives for trying to bring these two misfits togeteher.
But is does take an interminable time getting to the point. The second half lasts a numbing 100 minutes and the climax comes as something of a relief. There are reasons why this is one of O'Neill's less-often revived pieces and whilst there is a lot to admire here it is less easy to enjoy this very wordy play. - 62.6.139.13)
23 Nov 06
This is what theatre is all about. I cannot understand how people found this boring! I was absolutely enthralled. Eve Best was magnificent and so were Kevin Spacey and Colm Meaney. This to me is what live theatre is all about. Brilliant direction, script and acting. The passion just filled the stage, as well as the pain and caring. How people can compare this to Rock and Roll, where we walked out at half time, I just don't know. It flowed, just one set and you knew where the characters were coming from and why. Just magnificent - 62.72.33.56)
15 Nov 06
I don't understand how people can find this dull. I mean this play is so full of human life! Excellent. Outstanding performances from Kevin Spacey, Eve Best and Colm Meaney - 213.86.133.216)
10 Nov 06
I agree with SLR. It was incredibly dull and now i have to write an essay on it. oh Boohoo:( GLD - 194.154.22.51)
06 Nov 06
i didn't like it and i was bored. - 194.154.22.51)
06 Nov 06
This is a magnificent production by Howard Davies of Eugene O'Neill's over long, over ripe but ultimately undeniably affecting drama. Eve Best is tremendous as the feisty farmgirl awash with conflicting emotion, while Colm Meaney combines truth and welcome comedy as her conniving father. Kevin Spacey gives a compelling, technically proficient performance as the wretchedly drunken Tyrone. If I was less moved by him than I felt I should be, it's maybe because I was so aware of the mechanics of the acting. Not so the wonderful Ms Best whose despairing closing moments of the show are genuinely heartbreaking. The set and lighting are beautiful and atmospheric, and this really is a show to put the Old Vic back on the map, after a lamentable recent track record. Word of warning for the weak bladdered: don't have a pint in the interval as Act 2 is nearly twice as long as Act 1!!! - 195.82.123.181)
The Old Vic is one of the oldest theatres in London and famous throughout the English speaking world. Long known as 'the actors theatre', many of the greatest performers of the last century have played on its stage. In September 2004, The Old Vic Theatre Company was launched, under the artistic leadership of Kevin Spacey, to present a wide range of work, from the classic to the new, to appeal to both traditional theatre-goers and new audiences.
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