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.

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