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New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Howard Davies.
Cast: Kevin Spacey, Eve Best, Colm Meaney
Description: Josie, a woman with a ruined reputation, lives in a dilapidated farmhouse with her conniving dad, Phil. The formidable pair scrape together some form of livelihood while Josie shows her softer side in her love for alcoholic Jim Tyrone, a washed-out, third-rate actor. Classic drama by Eugene O'Neill, with Kevin Spacey as Jim and Eve Best as Josie.
Trains: Tube/BR: Waterloo 
Phone: 0870060 6628
Website: www.oldvictheatre.com
Extra info: Food, Pub
Kevin Spacey commands the stage in A Moon for the Misbegotten
No modern playwright washed more of his dirty linen in the public gaze of theatre than obsessively autobiographical Eugene O'Neill, whose family-life was troubled by drink, drugs and sex.
Yet even today, when the famous line up to confess their personal griefs and guilt to some television host(ess), I doubt whether the rarely revived A Moon for the Misbegotten, a comic-pathetic memory-piece and O'Neill's last attempt to make peace with his family's past, will be much of a crowd-puller.
It tugs pliable heart-strings, though, in the play's crucial passages, where Eve Best as tenant farmer Phil Hogan's plain, late twenties daughter Josie lets her well-fortified defences down.
Admitting her reputation for screwing around is just a sham, Best's endearingly gauche, gawky Josie, pathetic in her romantic hankering, aspires to shed her ill-fitting virginity to Kevin Spacey's secretly troubled Jim Tyrone, suave and debonair in a three-piece suit.
This Broadway playboy, based upon O'Neill's brother, is the man whom she would marry at the drop of a proposition. Unfortunately, true to O'Neill's governing belief that his own family was doomed to live in the past and repeat it, Tyrone will only allow Josie to soothe his troubled soul as he lies in her lap one moonlit night. He is not up for lasting sexual love.
Howard Davies's blunt-edged rather than piercing production reminds me how irritated I am by the artificiality of O'Neill's self-analysing, longwinded characters who take extravagantly to suffering as if it were a pill that made you glad to be low.
In A Moon for the Misbegotten, the romantic plot is artfully stirred to life by a drama of deceptions and subterfuge that relate to Tyrone's apparent threat to sell the farm to a loathed neighbour. Designer Bob Crowley's unatmospheric, cheap- looking set envisages the place as a dilapidated hovel with blue sidewalls, two permanent clouds, and a pump by which Josie sits.
Best's Josie changes from farming apron into blue dress and waits in poignant, girlish, smitten hopefulness for a serious glance from Tyrone. Spacey, who fixes her with more of a sinister stare than a romantic gaze and goes through the romantic motions with minor enthusiasm, never manages to turn on the sexual electricity for her. This potentially interesting romance looks one-sided.
The climactic scene of anguish, in which Jim laments that his dying mother saw him drunk and admits that when he accompanied her corpse on a train going east he consoled himself with prostitutes, ought to be crucial. O'Neill clearly intended it to explain Jim's dysfunctional behaviour, aimless lifestyle and inability to form enduring sexual relationships. It does no such thing. No ghosts are laid amidst much glib psychologising.
Spacey's Tyrone does command the stage with his electrifying displays of rage and sly shafts of comedy. His air of glazed, studied calm typifies an alcoholic who holds his drink. Spacey is, however, an actor who cannot, so to speak, easily unbutton himself before an audience. When called upon to lose control, to break down, he goes dutifully through the motions without ever really experiencing them.
So his Tyrone does not arouse the sympathy for which O'Neill appeals. Best, no convincing weeper herself, still makes a strong, desolate impression as a woman seeking a husband, who merely becomes a temporary mother substitute.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Disappointing. The set is great and the acting fine, but there is no escaping the flaws of the play which is an ill-disciplined piece of writing with a barely credible 'plot'. The first half is an extended piece of vaguely comic stereotyping of a dysfunctional drunken Irish-American family - amusing for 15 minutes perhaps but no more - the gags become increasingly predictable and frankly embarassing. The second half has the meat of the play, but goes on for far too long and achieves no sensible resolution. The 'baring ones soul' genre does not have to be ludicrous but at times this play manages it. A great pity that such theatrical skills have been used on such an inferior work.
- Stephen, Essex
I have always loved the Old Vic and have seldom, if ever been disappointed with a show or a performance. Was I disappointed this time? Absolutley not!
Kevin Spacey's portait of the soured, complex and embittered Jim Tyrone is brilliant. Eve Best takes Josie at full force, you not only see, but feel her pain, a truly magical performance and Colm Meany's, irasible Phil Hogan is just about perfect. Thank you all for a magic night.
- Lynn, Hitchin, Herts
This was my first visit to the Old Vic and I couldn't have been more happy with the theatre, the production, the actors AND the set. Ok, the play is rather self indulgent, but I thought the actors, without exception were excellent, bringing out the humour and pathos to brilliant effect. Kevin Spacey was the draw for me and he did not disappoint; in fact I could say that what I like about the Old Vic is that it is a place where you do go to see him. I certainly didn't get the feeling that he had to be the star, after all Eve Best was the last performer to make the curtain call, not him. I felt every emotion on that stage was totally believable and the casting was spot on. What does it take to make a reviewer happy?
- Sandy P-G, Newmarket, Suffolk, England
What I dislike about the Old Vic is that it is now a place where you go to see Kevin Spacey, and that he has to be the star of every production put on there. This is the story of Josie who lives with her cunning father Phil. They live hand to mouth, and Josie falls in love with Jim, a wannabe actor with a drink problem. Kevin Spacey plays Jim, but I thought he would be better suited to playing Phil, the father. Despite this he played his role well, and if you've not seen Spacey on stage before you'll be impressed by his presence in this.
- Aimee, Chalk Farm
