By IRVING WARDLE

Whatever its relationship with the lost plays that formed the rest of Eugene O’Neill’s American history cycle, this one complete survivor has a clear and honourable place among the great plays of his final period.

Written in the late 1930’s, is shows O’Neill discarding his theatrical masks and coming directly to terms with his private obsessions. The result is not the complete act of revelation in Long Day’s Journey, but it is a work of searing honesty and one in which he also succeeded in relating his family myth to the surrounding world.

Its hero, like James Tyrone, is a barnstorming actor who bestrides the domestic stage for want of a public platform. The difference is that Con Melody is trapped in a role he once played in real life, as a gallant major in Wellington’s army, now declined into a lowly Bostonian tavern-keeper.

Like Mary Tyrone cherishing her wedding dress, Con cherishes his uniform, which comes out once a year on the anniversary of the Battle of Talavera - to the admiration of his peasant wife and the derision of his daughter Sara (Rudi Davies). O’Neill locks into this period by synchronizing Con’s aristocratic pretensions with the election of Andrew Jackson, the first “common man” president; and by introducing a love affair between Sara and a young Boston Brahmin she rescues from a Thoreau-like retreat by a nearby lake.

Both men have a “touch of the poet”; Con as a Byronic narcissist, and the unseen Stephen as a transcendental versifier. The symmetry is perfect.

For all these separate elements, it is Con alone who projects the action on its course; an archetypal O’Neill protagonist who clings for survival to his dream, and who inflicts endless damage on those nearest to him through self- hatred.

And one achievement of David Thacker’s beautifully cast production is that it goes a long way to rescuing Con from the theatrical void.

Timothy Dalton presents the kind of “big-chested, chisled-mug, romantic old boy” that O’Neill demanded. He is also very moving in those endlessly recurring passages where Con, having launched a tirade of unforgivably brutal insults against his womenfolk, instantly caves in with tender, heartfelt pleas for forgiveness.

Beyond that, he shows the character a arm’s length, posturing in front of the shebeen mirror and quoting Byron. Con may be tragic (as where he finally reverts to his bog-Irish identity); he is certainly funny. He is partnered by Vanessa Redgrave, who takes on board Eugene O’Neill’s dubious proposition that women are fulfilled by love, no matter how domestically enslaved.

She is at once exhausted and radiant; rising to passion when her Irish sympathies are touched, or when anyone dares to find fault with her appalling man.