Desire Under The Elms - Smock Alley, Dublin

Given his eminence in American theatre, it is surprising that the works of Eugene O’Neill, the son of Irish emigrants, are not performed more often in this country. Then again, O’Neill tended to favour the epic over the intimate, his plays often require elaborate staging, and they have not dated particularly well.

Desire Under The Elms is a case in point. The 18th of his 32 full-length plays, it labours under its allusions to Greek tragedy and O’Neill’s insistence on capturing the nuances of New England backwoods speech. Sadly, the accent of the rural hick has been parodied so often in American film and theatre that it is hard to take seriously any attempt to reproduce it in a straight drama. In this production, the five actors’ accents are not really consistent either.