Spacey's resolve pays off in aces
MOON OF THE MISBEGOTTEN
Old Vic
EUGENE O’Neill is the giant of 20th-century American theatre and a writer not for the faint hearted. From a life of personal anguish and continual tragic circumstances he wrote with a profound poetic insight punctuating it with flashes of Irish humour.
Under Howard Davies’s direction, Kevin Spacey, Eve Best and Colm Meaney pull off this story of frustrating and persistence in the life of a small tenement farm in Connecticut in 1923.
Phil Hogan (Colm Meaney) is an Irishman who has the cheek of the Devil and an overdose of Irish charm.
Josie, his daughter (Eve Best) copes with his boozing and performs the endless chores keeping order by fist and truncheon.
Jim Tyrone, the unpaid landlord, is based on O’Neill’s alcoholic brother Jamie and in Kevin Spacey’s hand it is an essay in pain which can never be cured even by his love for Josie and hers for him.
She is a bare-footed beauty with a promiscuous reputation but the scenes between them are the stuff of unbearable and inevitable tragedy.
Best moves from aggressive Irish tinker woman to radiating beauty, a doomed woman, a performance of memorable understanding.
Colm Meaney captures the roguery of an Irish pig farmer, dealing with prohibition by cunningly hording bottles of bourbon, sharing Josie’s resignation to her lot. A seductive performance worthy of the late Walter Huston.
Bob Crowley’s set with a chipboard house, telephone lines and yard pump at this remote dirt farm helps to evoke the intensity of the passion played out here. Josie’s last words, and indeed the last words O’Neill wrote for the stage, are: “Forgiveness and peace.”
Billy Carter, as Phil’s nervous but rich neighbour, T Steadman Harder, is a welcome bit of comic relief in his jodhpurs, hunting bowler and riding crop. Duped and intimidated by the old rogue and the menace of Josie.
Kevin Spacey has grown enormously in authority over the last two years and this significant addition to current London theatre is a tribute to his dedication and further evidence of his resolve to re-establish the Old Vic. Let’s hear it for Kev.
Until Dec 23
CNJ booking line: 0870 040 0070 Click here to book tickets
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