Ah, Wilderness!, Young Vic Theatre, London - review

The sands of time are visibly present in Natalie Abrahami's poignant staging of Ah, Wilderness! The director filled the Young Vic stage with silt for Happy Days and she's brought the beach with her again for this Eugene O'Neill 1933 comedy (yes, comedy) about the coming of age of the teenage central character Richard.

The original is set in 1906 Connecticut but here anachronistic costumes lift the play from its moorings and set it floating. The beachside house appears long abandoned, given over to the sand which lies in great drifts against the walls. The older Richard wanders the scenes, summoning the characters from his memory. The sandy landscape (designed by Dick Bird) seems perverse at first and can be distracting, as family members scale the dunes in search of the dining table, but as the story takes hold, this curious dreamlike setting draws out the play's melancholic undertones and the wistful sense of a family idealised through imagination (O'Neill described it as the boyhood he would like to have had).

For here, as in the playwright's desolate epic Long Day's Journey into Night, there is drunkenness, fighting and rebellion, but in this case, rough harmony is restored. Over two days during the July 4 celebrations, bookish young Richard who, like Romeo, is aflame with the idea of being in love, breaks off with his sweetheart, rows with his parents, gets drunk in a bar, flirts with a prostitute and succumbs to a lecture about the birds and the bees from his father. George MacKay gives a masterclass as the tormented teenager: very funny without being patronising, he catches the rawness and volatility of youth, rebellious one moment and childlike the next. He's nicely matched by Martin Marquez as his father, who seeks to be stern but finds it hard not to forgive his coltish son, and by Janie Dee as his wry, fretful mother.

The play is slight, there are stilted passages of writing, with characters delivering slabs of exposition, and several individuals are underwritten, including Richard's older brother, Arthur. But this delicate production brings out its bittersweet interplay of light and dark - above all in the portrayal of Uncle Sid, the jovial family drunk, wonderfully funny in Dominic Rowan's portrayal but a tragedy in the making, particularly for the long-suffering woman in love with him (Susannah Wise) - and highlights its deep sense of yearning for what might have been.

To May 23,youngvic.org

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