The acting in Kevin Spacey's latest offering elevates this minor work A Moon for the Misbegotten The Old Vic, London SE1

It seems as if there are, at the moment, two drastically opposing ways to treat a "classic" piece of drama. Directors tend either to strip it down and speed it up, or to respect every last syllable, treat it with reverence and present it in its entirety. This is how Howard Davies seems to have approached A Moon for the Misbegotten, which has just opened at the Old Vic with a running time of three hours plus.

Eugene O'Neill's last play is generally regarded as a minor pendant to its predecessor Long Day's Journey Into Night, and continues the history of the doomed drinker and washed-up Broadway playboy Jim Tyrone.

Yet we have a long wait until Tyrone, played by Kevin Spacey, weaves unsteadily, smoking and chanting in cod Latin, on to the stage and kicks the play into life. Until then we must experience the heat of a Connecticut morning in the company of his impoverished tenants, whose rootlessness and vulnerability have a thumping contemporary resonance.

Phil Hogan, an Irish immigrant (played by a shambling Colm Meaney), lives on Tyrone's land with a single daughter, voluptuous and brash Josie (Eve Best), who looks as capable of hoeing a field as of hitting her father across the head with a club. Which she does, quite often. Her younger brother, Mike, has just cleared off to find his fortune, and Josie is left at the clapboard shack she calls home with Pa and a yearning desire for Tyrone, a desire that she masks with a combination of aggression and contempt.

The plot, such as it is, is hardly gripping; there's a next-door neighbour, a haughty Englishman who is fed up with the dirty Hogans and their roaming pigs. He comes over to complain; they send him packing, and soaking. He then attempts to buy the land on which they live from Tyrone. Tyrone pretends to sell it to him. Before she finds out this is no more than a joke, Josie is encouraged by her father to stop the scheme by seducing Tyrone with a bottle of "bonded" bourbon and the promise of a clinch in the moonlight.

But, for all her connivance that she's a slapper, Josie is a virgin. And for all his boasts that he is an urbane wit with a posse of Broadway babes, Tyrone is a lost, stranded soul. The essence of the play is the journey that these two take in baring their souls to one another.

Fortunately the chemistry between Spacey and Best and their acting talent are such that neither has any difficulty in depicting the passion that each feels, but must not demonstrate, for the other. They veritably undress each other with a gaze; their voices almost, but not quite, tremble when they converse. You long for them to fall into each other's arms.

Of course, this being O'Neill, nothing so splendid happens. Tyrone gets ferociously drunk and relays a ghastly story of escorting his mother's corpse on a train while he is laying a whore "with a come-on smile as cold as a polar bear's feet". Josie, having put on her best stockings for her gentleman caller, must put up with a bourbon-sodden Tyrone pillowed on her breasts, more as child than lover.

Although there is nothing particularly out of step with Davies's production (apart from the accents - in particular Meany's brogue, which seems to wander right out of the Emerald Isle and back again), I would say that this play is for O'Neill devotees only. It is an over-long work, uplifted by the acting skills of the company, and particularly Spacey's star status, which radiates from the stage whenever he is on it. The problem is that drunkards are actually rather boring, whether they are singing to the moon or feeling misbegotten beneath it.

For further info and booking details visit www.oldvictheatre.com

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