Mirren's gripping epic

As with serious hurricanes and dangerous floods, Eugene O'Neill's family melodrama of murder, erotic desire and guilt only sweeps down upon us once every 40 years or so. Howard Davies's spectacular new production, the first revival in a major London playhouse since 1961, duly batters us with waves of sexual hankering and drenches us in confessions, hatreds and heavy hints of incest - that unfortunate sexual proclivity which is best kept strictly in the family.

The impact of this wordy, four-and-a-half hour epic, in which voluptuous Dame Helen Mirren dusts down her ample sex appeal to play Christine, an American brigadier general's wife who poisons her husband after regularly pleasuring herself with Paul McGann's Adam, a youngish sea captain, is wild, windy and weird, but compelling too.

The trouble is that O'Neill cannot resist the lure of cheap melodrama. With him Mourning becomes excessive. Words and situations keep taking an unfair turn to the sensational.

O'Neill's source of inspiration was Aeschylus's The Oresteia, that classic Greek trilogy about revenge, justice and morality in which Clytemnestra slaughters her husband for sacrificing their daughter in war and sees the family tree split and crack. Mourning Becomes Electra is a very rough-cut of that situation, but transposed to America in 1865, just after the Civil War's end.

O'Neill, an early enthusiast for Freud, brooded little about morality or justice in his play. He was more concerned with the psychology of sexual relations in Christine's divided, disturbed family. By the end Guilt, that well-known avenger in Calvinistic New England, has served as a no-nonsense executioner. Bob Crowley's amazing, grand design, a shuttered house and slanted view of a neo-Grecian portico with columns whose ceiling is painted with peeling Stars and Stripes, suggests a world with one foot in the classical past and the other in an America rent asunder.

The set moves and turns to disclose spacious domestic interiors and once, breathtakingly, the ceilingis lowered and in seconds becomes part of the steamer where Christine's son Orin, just home from war, and daughter Lavinia eavesdrop on their mother's meeting with Adam.

Davies's production sensibly restrains the decibel level of melodrama. Dame Helen's Christine, defiantly-cool, camp and skittish, keeps the mood light - her displays of passion are alarmingly lukewarm.

She welcomes home Ezra, her unloved brigadier husband (Tim Pigott-Smith) with a dazzling display of artificiality. Her daughter, Eve Best's sulky Lavinia, whose tears and tantrums sound unreal, is one of O'Neill's obvious Freudian archetypes: Lavinia nurses a passion for father and hatred of mother, while Orin, anguishing in this sexual hothouse, has a very Oedipean complex.

The heavy pitch of this deceiving family tips towards the preposterously melodramatic. Yet when Dame Helen nonchalantly poisons Ezra, when Miss Best, initially behaving like some disturbed child, taunts her mother with the threat of exposure and Paul Hilton's superlative Orin visibly disintegrates after Christine's suicide, they do convey a remarkable sense of a family driven by dark obsessions beyond their control or understanding.

The trilogy ends repetitively when brother and sister succumb to endless recriminations. But the final image of Lavinia walking through the misty passageways of her house, as if a prisoner of the past, is indelibly powerful.

Mourning Becomes Electra, despite its fault-lines, imposes a fierce theatrical grip.