Eugene O’Neill is widely (and rightly) judged America’s first great playwright and Beyond the Horizon is his first great play. An immediate success when premiered in 1920, it went on to win its young writer the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes. Since the work is very rarely seen, in Britain at least, the revival at Northampton is an event of some importance; that it is so brilliantly managed under the Royal&Derngate’s artistic director Laurie Sansom makes the revival well-nigh unmissable.

The play is being performed as part of the short Young America season, until November 14. This also offers British audiences their first chance to enjoy Spring Storm, a recently rediscovered early play (reviewed elsewhere on this site) by Tennessee Williams, a writer who acknowledged a considerable debt to O’Neill and likewise wrested artistic achievement from a very unhappy upbringing.

With one team of actors giving us both plays, there is opportunity for interesting comparisons. In Beyond the Horizon, Liz White again gives a gripping performance as a young woman forced to chose between suitors portrayed, as in Spring Storm, by the same fine young actors. As the rivals, Michael Malarkey and Michael Thomson supply another study in contrasting characters, being respectively once more a poetic, bookish dreamer (Robert Mayo) and a rugged, go-getting achiever (Andrew Mayo, his brother).

Though it looks at first as if Andrew is to win the girl and take over the family farm, things do not turn out that way. Confessing his love as he prepares to depart for a life on the ocean waves with his sea dog of an uncle (Robin Bowerman), Robert is surprised, and delighted, to find that neighbour Ruth feels the same about him. Roles are reversed. Andrew – noble in defeat – heads to sea, with the curse of his father (James Jordan) ringing in his ears, leaving Robert to marry and, as dad feared, make an utter hash of life on the land.

Like almost all of O’Neill’s greatest plays this one tells a sad, sad story, wherein the characters struggle to find themselves through suffering. Set in New England, it is heavily imbued with the sound and smell of that mysterious and magical zone which lies ‘beyond the horizon’ – the sea.

Mr Sansom and composer Jon Nicholls help to conjure this presence through the use, most affectingly, of the plangent melody of Shenandoah. As O’Neill writes in the stage notes to Mourning Becomes Electra, in which the shanty has an important place, this is “a song that more than any other holds in it the brooding rhythm of the sea”. How right he was.

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