Ah, Wilderness!, Young Vic, theatre review: A haunting, witty production

George Mackay is splendid in Eugene O'Neill's semi-autobiographical work

Members of the company in in Ah, Wilderness! at the Young Vic

The setting is the same Connecticut seashore home as in the angst-ridden Long Day's Journey Into Night. But the mood of Eugene O'Neill's earlier semi-autobiographical play is surprisingly humorous and benign.

It's a conscious piece of wish-fulfilment, dramatising an alternative boyhood that the playwright could more easily have survived – in the midst of a family where the problems of addiction are off-centre (Dominic Rowan brilliant as a comic-sad drunkard uncle) and where youthful revolt against puritan convention is eventually met with supportive parental understanding.

George MacKay, Janie Dee and Martin Marquez in Ah, Wilderness!

Natalie Abrahami's haunting, witty production turns the piece, set on Independence Day 1906, into a dream-like memory play.

There's now a scribbling, intently watchful author-figure. The great sloping dunes of Dick Bird's extraordinary design are also the figurative sands of time from which remembered objects (family dining table et al) have here to be literally pulled.

By contrast, all the performances are rich in humane, realistic detail. George Mackay is splendid as Richard, the idealistic 17 year old who, thinking he's been chucked by his girlfriend, goes for a night on the town. In a very funny and touching performance, the actor captures both the endearing absurdity og Richard's righteous adolescent flouncing as literary sophisticate, cynic, and first-time drunk and the vulnerability of the sincere romantic soul beneath.

To 23 May; 020 7922 2922