A Moon for the Misbegotten, Almeida Theatre review - Michael Shannon sears the night sky

Michael Shannon's long legs reach to the stars – or perhaps one should say the moon – in the Almeida's hypnotic revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten, the late Eugene O'Neill play that hasn't been seen in London since Kevin Spacey and Eve Best led an Old Vic revival of it in 2006.

And Shannon, seen in London early in his career Off West End in Tracy Letts's Bug, makes an occasion of a play that I, for one, am always happy to welcome back to the repertoire.

Sure, there will always be those for whom O'Neill goes on too much, and for too long, and who resist the heightened tendency to this author's writing evident not least from the grandeur of his titles – this one, say, or The Iceman Cometh. But set Shannon on a collision course with the haunted James Tyrone, the same feckless, drink-sodden character he previously played as a younger man on Broadway in Long Day's Journey Into Night, to which this play is a sort of sequel, and you feel the extraordinary alchemy that occurs when performer and part merge into one. You're left eavesdropping on life even as Shannon's James gives off the anguished mien of the walking dead. 

Tyrone, in fact, is the last of this play's three defining characters to step on to Tom Scutt's ladder-strewn set, which is far more naturalistic than is this expert designer's wont. The director, Rebecca Frecknall, cut her teeth largely on Tennessee Williams across three revivals at this address, and the expressionist tendencies worked up by herself and Scutt on the likes of Williams's Summer and Smoke here find an outlet in the lighting design from recent Tony winner Jack Knowles (Sunset Boulevard), which sends a circular light roving round the auditorium, omitting no one from its forensic gaze. 

There's prickly comedy to be had from the initial interplay between the inhabitants of the 1920s New England farm where the play is set. This rough-hewn landscape, which its occupants fear may soon be whisked away from them, is populated by the flinty widower Phil Hogan (David Threlfall) and his daughter, Josie (Ruth Wilson), who sees herself as a "a big ugly hulk" even if Shannon's Tyrone, upon arrival, will take a more munificent view. Indeed, there can be few roles where a female character's physique is as extensively remarked upon as Josie's is here, and Wilson is objectively considerably more beautiful than the character as described.

Tenant farmers at risk of eviction, the Hogans see a solution to their troubles in Josie's possible seduction (and blackmail) of Tyrone, their landlord, though it's giving nothing away that things don't remotely go to plan.

Once Tyrone arrives, wearing self-disgust like an invisible veil none too easily pierced, Josie recognises in this hunted, psychically besieged presence an unexpectedly kindred spirit. It's up to these two misbegotten souls, under the penetrating glare of the watchful moon, to effect a mutual absolution that might grant them some degree of peace. 

They greet one another only to surrender to a passion that surprises even themselves, the virgin-whore dichotomy that has marked out Josie, at least in her own eyes, simpified to something more basic, and essential, in the calming embrace of James. Alas, he exists a "crying jag" away from the ongoing shame and guilt accompanying the debt to alcohol that led him to miss his own mother's funeral. O'Neill buffs will know that matriarch as the morphine-addicted Mary Tyrone, who was played by a Tony-winning Jessica Lange in the 2016 Broadway revival that co-starred Shannon. 

I first came across this play in a screen version of the fabled 1970s revival, with Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst, that my parents spoke in hushed tones of having seen, Dewhurst starting the play by scrubbing the stage floor as an indication of Josie's hardscrabble routine. I've seen the play live four or five times since, the Josie almost always outshining her James – as was very much true of Eve Best's open-faced take on the role opposite a strangely hollow Spacey. 

It's entirely revelatory, therefore, to find Shannon scooping up the blasted, Hamlet-adjacent poetry of the play and running with it, so definitively so that I found myself wondering whether Janet McTeer (probably too old now for the role) might have been his ideal match. Wilson, a onetime Anna Christie at the Donmar, acquits herself nobly as someone who has allowed the judgments of others to fester within her own, ever-doubting self, but the performance would benefit from more vocal firepower. Too often, she and Shannon sound as if they are operating quite literally on different wavelengths, though there's no denying the import of the fleeting symbiosis that brings the play to its anguished climax. (Threlfall hits his mark throughout, the only challenge there, for some, being the impasto of his Irish accent.) 

Averring that there's "no present or future, only the past", James rewrites his own's mother's celebrated appraisal in Long Day's Journey that "the past is the present, it's the future, too". The difference here is that James is shrewd enough to clock the cruel realisation that his actions have denied himself a future, and that the brief sanctification he finds in the present with the adoring Josie will soon be banished irrevocably to his own past. That might sound too grievous for comfort if it weren't the way of art to offer its own consolation in Shannon's lastingly hurtful performance, which is sure to follow you into the night and, from there, all the way home. 

• A Moon for the Misbegotten to 16 August at the Almeida
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