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The
London Times, September 27, 2006
A Moon for the Misbegotten
By BENEDICT
NIGHTINGALE
One
might have thought that O’Neill’s autobiographical Long Day’s Journey
into Night was sufficient tribute to the elder brother who had died,
half-blinded and three-quarters crazed by alcohol, back in 1923. But the
American dramatist didn’t feel the play made poor Jamie’s love for their
mother sufficiently clear. And so, weeping uncontrollably as he did so,
he wrote Moon for the Misbegotten as an afterpiece or
propitiatory offering that would confront, understand and forgive the
tormented young man’s more appalling antics.
Howard Davies’s 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. Under the moon of the title, Spacey’s Jim Tyrone,
as he’s been renamed, unloads his guilt to the only woman who genuinely
loves him, Best’s Josie — and you feel you’re looking into the stomach,
the intestines and very marrow of private agony.
But that’s not what you expect during the play’s longwinded exegesis and
heavyhanded comedy. Against the background of his farmhouse, a mix of
corrugated iron and rough timbering that might have been designed for
unfussy hens, Colm Meaney’s grizzled old Phil Hogan and daughter Josie
hilariously humiliate their posh Anglo neighbour, then begin to worry.
Could their landlord and friend, Spacey’s Jim, betray them by selling
the place and using the profits on his booze and tarts? Frankly, it’s
not that fascinating an issue and comes with a dollop more stage
Irishness (Did I really hear Meaney’s otherwise impressively human Hogan
say “at all, at all”?) than even Davies’s fine direction can camouflage.
But then Spacey’s half-tipsy Jim arrives, allowing the play-proper
belatedly to begin. 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.
Hitting bottom and below, he admits that he did what O’Neill’s brother
did in life. He drank and rutted with “a fat pig of a whore” on the
California-New York train which, in the baggage car just ahead, carried
the body of the mother he adored, arriving so crashed he couldn’t even
attend the old lady’s funeral. 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 onstage, you feel you’re seeing a dead man
walking. The defeat, the numb grief, the disbelief and childlike
bewilderment are all there, as, later, is the contempt, the rage, the
destructiveness, the disgust that can say “when I poison people they
stay poisoned”. Best’s Josie catches the warmth and tenderness behind
the termagant façade without succumbing to the slightest sentimentality
or underplaying the hurt and indignation she feels when she believes Jim
is cheating her. Is there better acting to be found anywhere? I’d be
surprised. |
