Latest news with #AMoonfortheMisbegotten
Spectator
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Scooby-Doo has better plots: Almeida's A Moon for the Misbegotten reviewed
A Moon for the Misbegotten is a dream-like tragedy by Eugene O'Neill set on a barren farm in Connecticut. Phil Hogan and his daughter Josie have worked the rocky soil for 20 years and they've come up with a joke. 'If cows could eat stones this would be a grand dairy farm.' Phil is a coarse, shifty bully who starts the play by assaulting his neighbour and threatening to murder him. For some reason this crime goes unpunished and the incident isn't mentioned again. Very odd. The elements of this lop-sided story are clumsily arranged by O'Neill. His cold, narcissistic characters don't make much sense and the subplot concerning a property deal is so complicated that it doesn't affect the narrative one way or another. The lead character, Josie (Ruth Wilson), feels like a collection of male virtues poured into a female vessel. She's beautiful, wild, free, foul-mouthed, sexy and violent. And she's a gifted seductress with numerous conquests to her name. Or is she? Later it transpires that Josie likes to spread rumours about her romantic exploits while preserving her virginity for Mr Right. Why would she do that? She's a fantasy. Her suitor, James, based on the playwright's brother, is a rich, pretentious alcoholic with an eating disorder and a death wish who likes to quote Rossetti and Keats. Halfway through the play he decides to spend his fortune launching a Broadway career. On the eve of his departure for New York, he attempts to seduce Josie but she has other ideas. Encouraged by her scheming father, she intends to ply him with booze and persuade him to sign his fortune over to her while under the influence. Episodes of Scooby-Doo have better plots than this. The play's centrepiece is a torrid love scene between James and Josie, although it's obvious that these two damaged weirdos are incapable of forming a relationship with anyone, let alone with each other. And their dialogue is so blunt and declarative that they might as well be characters in a radio play. Close your eyes and you'll be spared Tom Scutt's eccentric set. To represent the Hogans' farm, he dresses the playing area as an old timberyard full of unhinged doors, broken ladders, bits of plank and the remnants of a beaten-up piano. The deliberately clumsy lighting throws random shadows across the stage and, occasionally, across the faces of the cast. At the climax, the 'misbegotten moon' bathes the players in a sickly greenish glow which does nothing to cheer the atmosphere as James delivers a 30-minute screed of self-pity. Sozzled and uninhibited, he bangs on about the various disasters that blight his life. 'The smuttiest-talking pig I ever met' is his description of a former girlfriend. He recalls another old flame who 'had a come-on smile as cold as a polar bear's feet'. The catalogue of woe never ends. Josie screams at him to shut up but he keeps adding more hassles to the list: his alcoholic gluttony, the ill health of his poor mother, his doomed passion for horse racing, and suddenly, clump, he falls unconscious. What a relief. Could this be a unique moment in the entire theatrical repertoire? A character who witters himself into a coma. The faults of this yarn can be summarised in a single word. Misanthropy. It's about nasty people doing nasty things for nasty reasons. And it lasts three long hours. Showmanism by Dickie Beau is an illustrated podcast featuring clips from various theatre luminaries. The stage is furnished as a workshop full of props and costumes which Beau uses to dramatise the recorded anecdotes. He mimes every word of the script, including the coughs, pauses and hesitations of the contributors. An amazing feat. It must have taken him weeks of practice to get it right, but the effect is oddly unimpressive. The best part is Ian McKellen's recollection of playing Lear at West Yorkshire Playhouse and 'drying' on stage. He kept the script hidden in Prospero's book of spells but a diligent stagehand had removed it before the performance. He had to 'walk off stage in a Prospero kind of way' to receive his line. Other treats include the comic, Steve Nallon, explaining that David Cameron is impossible to impersonate because he has no essence to capture. Fiona Shaw sounds a little pretentious as she recalls playing the lead in Beckett's Happy Days at Epidaurus. Towards the end, Beau succumbs to the same temptation as he analyses the mechanics of the piece. He plays a recording of himself wondering if he should feature in his own show. After much rumination, he concludes that he deserves to be included, and he duly mimes to the sound of his own voice. Fair enough. But a few extra gags from McKellen might have been more welcome.
Time Out
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
A Moon for the Misbegotten
It's a trap, almost, to think of Eugene O'Neill's final play A Moon for the Misbegotten as a sequel to his miserable masterpiece Long Day's Journey Into Night. Sure, they share the character of Jim Tyrone, a dissolute young actor in Long Day's Journey and a dissolute older actor here. But you go in expecting despair and instead find something that's more like an episode of Steptoe and Son. Maybe that's down to director Rebecca Frecknall – now a master of whipping the lesser-revived plays of the American canon into shape – putting space between this and the old workhorse of Long Day's Journey (which we've seen three times in London in the last 13 years): not the faded grandeur of a seaside home here, but a wooden yard full of splintered timbers pointing into the sky, messy and dusty. The production itself, though, is anything but dusty. From the first moment, every line is a punch or a jab or a dagger. Peter Corboy and Ruth Wilson as siblings Mike and Josie burst onto the stage and whack each other with dialogue, and their fists. Fed up with his dad Phil's drunkenness and slave-driving on their rock-infested farm, Mike is leaving. All that's left to Phil is daughter Josie, whose sleeping around has made her 'the scandal of the neighbourhood', and their landlord Jim Tyrone who may or may not sell the farm to them and who may or may not be in love with Josie. David Threlfall is a hoot as Phil, roaring and whimpering, and giving us some hilarious line deliveries. It's surprising just how funny these early scenes are, especially the exchanges between Josie and Phil, the two of them as roguish and stubborn as each other, like two blunt instruments. But what this does share with Long Day's Journey, and with all of O'Neill's best work, is the seven or eight layers of contradictory meaning that each line hides, and a cast full of characters who can't tell themselves the truth. Here, they are all bent on believing they are the worst versions of themselves: Josie that she's a whore, Jim that he's a drunk, Phil that he's got no heart. Like L ong Day's Journey, the play becomes an excavation until the characters have dug themselves down to bare rock. Clapping her hands, slapping castmates' shoulders, Wilson plays Josie with an almost hoedown physicality that's impossible not to watch. It takes Josie the longest to pick apart the shell that entombs her, and Wilson shows us someone so shored up with defence mechanisms that every movement and every word has become a careful act - though it's sometimes too fine a line to tell whether it's Wilson acting or Josie acting. Stick that alongside Michael Shannon's sloth-like slowness, and it's like the quick and the dead: him sharp-suited and sluggish, her in rags and restless; her playful ribbing a world apart from his instant, unrelenting severity. Even his mouth seems reluctant to open too widely, and that complete lack of hurrying is completely engrossing. My god the man has presence. Frecknall handles it brilliantly: she knows how to let the humour ebb away, how to let the anguish build. Maybe there's a bit too much whisky-swilling and moonlight melodrama, but even when O'Neill's text sags, the production holds it up with fine-wrought acting or slowly circling lights or heartrending stage pictures, like Shannon doubled over in agony while Wilson holds him tightly to her. As she did with Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke, Frecknall turns the tilth on a half-buried play, and digs up something extraordinary.
Time Out
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Michael Shannon: ‘I think television is garbage – I certainly don't watch it'
Striding biblically into the green room at a London Bridge rehearsal studio, Michael Shannon is a daunting figure. Six foot three, craggier than Mount Rushmore and pathologically unsmiling, the double Academy Award nominated, Kentucky-born actor has the most 'just walked out of a Cormac McCarthy novel' energy to him of anyone I've ever met. 'Are you familiar with the play?' he asks immediately, in what is possibly an innocuous opening gambit, but also possibly an attempt to determine if I'm some sort of lightweight flim-flam entertainment journalist. Because we're not here to talk showbiz. We're here to talk about his role in the Almeida Theatre's revival of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten. And also we're here to talk about my favourite band of all time, REM. You will recognise Michael Shannon. It would be truly remarkable if you hadn't seen one of his films, because according to his official bio there are over 90 of them. Whether you know him from offbeat indie flicks (of which he has made dozens), huge blockbusters (he famously played General Zod in Man of Steel and The Flash) or somewhere in between (those Oscar nominations came for Sam Mendes's Revolutionary Road and Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals), it is a statistical inevitability that you have seen a Michael Shannon film. You'll recognise that rough-hewn face. You'll be aware he has range, but always presence and weight – he's not much of a romcom guy. What British audiences haven't seen for a long time is Michael Shannon on the stage. At home, he's an enormously prolific theatre actor: he does roughly a play a year. He's also a musician: he and musical partner Jason Narducy having spent what one can only assume to be the absolute last remaining seconds of Shannon's recent free time touring America with sets based around the first three albums of legendary indie rockers REM. Now Michael Shannon the theatre actor and Michael Shannon the musician are both heading our way. At the end of the summer he and Narducy will do two nights at the Islington Garage, playing REM's 1985 album Fables of the Reconstruction (which was recorded in London, at Wood Green's Livingstone Studios). But first A Moon for the Misbegotten, the great American playwright O'Neill's bleak but redemptive final play. It's not been seen in London since 2006, when Kevin Spacey starred as its cynical alcoholic lead James Tyrone Jr, a character based upon O'Neill's own brother. That performance made Spacey the first ever actor to have played James in both Moon and Long Day's Journey Into Night, O'Neill's most famous play, in which James Jr first appears. Now Shannon makes that a club of two. You played James Tyrone Jr on Broadway in a 2016 production of Long Day's Journey – presumably that was a good experience? 'Oh, that's one of my favourite productions I've ever been involved with. I adored the cast. Jessica Lange as my mum, and Gabriel Byrne as my dad, and John Gallagher Jr as my brother. Just a very, very tight knit group. I love building families on stage. It's one of the primary things that theatre is useful for, I think: we all have families, so we love to see others and how they function.' You must have been aware James Jr was in another O'Neill play: did you have long-held aspirations to do A Moon for the Misbegotten? 'Well, people would come to see Long Day's Journey and they mentioned A Moon for the Misbegotten. They'd say that I should do it. But I had no idea how that would ever come to pass. So it just kind of went in one ear and out the other. And then lo and behold my agent said that Rebecca [Frecknall, director] wanted to speak with me and it was like a gift.' UK audiences probably don't realise what an enormous amount of theatre you do despite your screen success – presumably it's very important to you? 'Film is a director's medium and TV is run by writers and producers and corporate overlords. I mean, I do television, because from time to time there are interesting projects that come across my desk, but by and large, I think television is garbage. I certainly don't watch it. Films are more interesting, but they're the director's medium, they're not theatre where an actor can really do their thing. I like acting, so that's why I do theatre. Do the lines between film and TV feel blurred in the streamer era? Like you have a new Netflix show (Death by Lightning) coming up… 'The thing I've learned about TV is you enjoy shooting it, but my expectations for it are zero. You walk away and you expect them to destroy it. That's what you expect. If and when you ever actually watch the damn thing, you expect it to be hugely disappointing, because a bunch of morons are gonna go in and screw it up.' But the buck stops with you on stage? 'There's no morons that come in who know nothing about art and have no training in the arts whatsoever manipulating the hard work that you've done as an artist and turning it into crap. In the theatre what the audience sees is what I want them to see.' What's a hard sell from you on Eugene O'Neill and this play? 'I think O'Neill is one of the finest playwrights who's ever lived. You know, Long Day's Journey, when he wrote it, he didn't want it to be produced because it was so personal to him, he didn't really think it was anybody's business. He was trying to ease his own suffering and I think it's similar with this play. The depth of the trauma he's trying to exorcise out of his own consciousness writing these plays, I have a tremendous amount of respect for it. We're really lucky to to have O'Neill because he changed drama forever.' James Tyrone Jr is based on O'Neill's older brother – do you find information like that useful or do you prefer to just build your own character? 'I mean I do both, you're a fool not to do as much research as you can. Now, 90 percent of it you may dispense with and say: I don't need to remember that or think about that ever again, but it's not going to hurt you, you know?' Let's talk about REM. You have an REM covers band, which is an unusual thing for a very busy actor to have… 'It was not my choice necessarily. We originated as a one-off show, a one-off performance of Murmur. That's what Jason Narducy and I do. We pick a record, we play the record, that's it. We do it one time. But we did Murmur in Chicago at a venue called Metro, and it was very popular and other venues started reaching out to Jason and saying please come do this here. And so, that was when Jason turned and said, well, what do you think? Should we do it more than once?' And then you toured the next two REM records… 'People were like, OK, are you gonna do the next one, which is very flattering. But I was not writing in my diary one night saying, you know, dear diary: I would like to go on tour with a band that plays REM. It was just kind of manifest destiny or something. We love playing it, people love hearing it, the band has been supportive and they're just the kindest, sweetest human beings you could ever want to meet.' The band recorded Fables in London – I think they famously had a fairly miserable time… 'One of the things I find most impressive was just what hard workers they were, all four of them, just the way they toured, the amount of music they created in such a short period of time. Those first five, six records – it's just unbelievable what they managed before they were even 30 years old.' Michael Stipe's early lyrics are famously indecipherable – as an actor do you feel you need to understand a song like 'Harborcoat' or 'Radio Free Europe' in the same way you understand James Jr? 'It's a different kind of understanding. I think words are not as effective at communicating as we like to think they are, which is why music is oftentimes so compelling. Which is why, frankly, probably a lot more people are moved by 'Harborcoat' than by going to see a play, because something's happening in that compressed period of time that is really at a very high frequency. It's a way people communicate a lot more effectively, than just language. Language is overrated I think. ' What have you been listening to lately? 'As I'm working on the play, I've been listening to a lot of ragtime; ragtime may actually predate this period, but for some reason it's been resonating with me as I work on that.' Oh interesting – I'd sort of assumed you were an indie rock guy… 'My musical taste is not even something you could write about really. It's too far reaching. I love music more than I could possibly express. I am not an indie rock guy. It doesn't mean I don't enjoy indie rock. I love indie rock. But I also love 50 other kinds of music.' You've been in over 90 films, plus TV, plus a play most years, plus a band: you, I mean, do you not ever require a break? That has to be relentless… 'Over 90? Really?' That's what it says in the bio your publicist sent over! 'Oh, well, there's no mandate for working or not working or anything.' You can't be taking much time off! 'I guess mathematically you might have a point, but I don't think much about it. There's a lot of stuff I don't do, where I'm like no, no thank you. But it's all a blur. They asked me to write my bio for the programme and at this point, I just find it kind of scary. I don't wanna even think about it, like it's a mess. Yes, I've done a lot of stuff. Just put: I've done a lot of stuff, the end. And then you write the damn thing and then they're like, oh, it's too long. What difference does it make what anybody's done? Yesterday, doesn't really even freaking matter. All that matters is right now.' A Moon for the Misbegotten is at the Almeida Theatre, now until Aug 16. Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy play The Garage, Aug 22 and 23.
Boston Globe
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Boston's theater community loses an influential founder
Ritchell, who died Dec. 30, 2024, leaves a rich legacy of committing to and nurturing some of Boston's best actors, directors, and designers (including Elliot Norton Award winners Advertisement 'Ron was a lovable curmudgeon and a craftsman actor with a particular stage presence,' said Plum, who was cast in one of the company's earliest productions, 'Dial M for Murder,' when she was a Boston University undergraduate. 'He and Polly were incredibly driven theater people and their knowledge of British theater was massive,' she said. 'They were among the pioneers of Boston theater who were committed to building a strong theater community here.' Ritchell worked as both an actor and director, giving memorable performances in such classics as 'A Moon for the Misbegotten' and 'Juno and the Paycock,' as well as in a much-beloved holiday production of Dylan Thomas's 'A Child's Christmas in Wales' that was adapted and directed by Hogan. At the Lyric, Ritchell and Hogan also produced 25 world premieres, but were best known for introducing Boston audiences to the relationship comedies of Alan Ayckbourn, and memorable productions of works by Noel Coward and George Bernard Shaw. Advertisement 'Ron, in his time, was a pillar of local theater, hiring local actors,' said actor Jeremiah Kissel, 'the one union contract in Boston for Boston actors when there were only three contract houses in town — the Huntington, ART, and the Lyric. Only Ron Ritchell and Polly Hogan did a full seven-show season using only local performers, and by doing so launched many career actors and actresses who successfully built lives right here in Boston.' Their commitment to local actors was also demonstrated by their leadership in launching the Theater Community Benevolent Fund (along with Mary C. Huntington, founder of the Nora Theatre), which provides confidential, financial relief to theater artists facing hardship. After leaving the Lyric in 1998, Ritchell and Hogan launched Lyric West before retiring first to Canada and then to Florida. Hogan passed away in 2023.
