Review: Desire Under the Elms, Almeida Theatre

I’d like to take out my red pen and edit Desire Under the Elms; it dawdles and is unhurried at times. Take the opening scene, which is a very elongated setup: a father who drove off in a cart, whereabouts unknown; two sons who want to escape the hard farm life; and their half-brother who wants the farm for himself. The two sons who want to escape, spoiler alert, do so soon after and never return, and barely get a mention in the rest of the play. You could easily reference that they’ve gone and why without having the long debate about life and whether they should or shouldn’t go. Things pick up when the father, Ephraim (Antony Byrne), returns with his new, young, third wife, Abbie (Kelly Gough), who immediately starts flirting with his son Eben (Zachary Momoh). Is it a calculated move on Abbie’s part, or is she genuinely in love? Will they get found out? This is the central tension in the story, which slowly plays out. The production is very stylised at times, with sequences of…

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