It’s a measure of Ruth Wilson’s talent that she utterly convinces as Josie Hogan, the spirited, rough-talking, Irish-American “ugly, overgrown lump of a woman” in Eugene O’Neill’s 1923-set romantic tragedy, despite being completely physically wrong for the part. Her Josie is intensely physical, brandishing her independence like a pitchfork or a pickaxe handle, attacked by sudden hiccups of laughter but capable of a whispering softness and a galling, contained grief.
Wilson is well-matched in Rebecca Frecknall’s starkly involving and surprisingly funny revival by the fine character actor Michael Shannon. The two-time Oscar nominee and stage veteran brings a drawn, agonised weariness to Jim Tyrone, the self-annihilating, whoremongering drunk who owns the rundown Connecticut farm where Josie and her father Phil (David Threlfall) – another catastrophic boozer – scratch a living. It’s a wonder anything got done in O’Neill’s vision of Prohibition-era America given how much hooch everyone’s slamming back and how much they talk.
