Eugene O'Neill's last play, written in 1943, is like a coda to Long Day's Journey Into Night. Played with passion, as it was in David Leveaux's 1983 revival at the Riverside Studios, it can be devastating. But although conscientiously competent, Matthew Lloyd's new production lacks O'Neill's peculiar cornered desperation.
In outline, the play sounds like rustic melodrama. We are down on the farm in backwoods Connecticut in 1923. Phil Hogan, an Irish-American tenant farmer, is terrified that his scratchy bit of land will be sold. To forestall that, he tries to get his hulking daughter, Josie, into bed with his womanising landlord, James Tyrone Jr.
But O'Neill remorselessly strips away the layers of pretence. Phil, we learn, is driven not by avarice but by paternal love. Josie, widely seen as a scandalous whore, is really a lovelorn innocent. And Tyrone, under his fake Broadway sophistication, is a guilt-ridden wreck craving posthumous absolution.
It is a play of gradual disclosure, one that arouses expectations of blarneying comedy and mortgage melodrama only to subvert them. Lloyd's production starts with the advantage of a fine set by Di Seymour that captures the sense of rural decay: cracked windows suspended from the flies, a dead bird impaled on a pole, ploughshares rusting in the yard. But the first half needs to be played with an ebullient, Boucicault-like staginess if the later revelations are to surprise us. By denying O'Neill's exaggerated theatricality, Lloyd robs the climax of its power.
The play is also hell to cast. Josie, nearly six feet tall and weighing 180lb, describes herself as "an ugly overgrown lump of a woman". Helen Schlesinger, however, has fine-boned features and a palpable physical attractiveness. She does all that acting can do by burying hatchets in wood stumps and squaring up with her fists to a richly effete neighbour. Her moonlit assignation with Tyrone has a deep maternal tenderness, but it is hard to believe this is her last, despairing emotional chance. Even more crucially, Finbar Lynch, though a suitably dapper dandy, never makes you feel that Tyrone's final confession of whoring while accompanying his mother's train-borne coffin is wrung from the depths of an anguished soul.
The best performance comes from Gerard Murphy as Josie's father. He has the right barrel-shaped bulk and implies the deviousness of a man who would use his own daughter as a blackmailing decoy. The truth, of course, is otherwise but Murphy gives us the bold theatrical outline in order to undermine it. He alone seems fully to grasp the point: that it is precisely because the play starts as comic Irish melodrama that its poetic revelation of human desperation is finally overwhelming.
Until February 24. Box office: 0161-833 9833.
