(Michael Billington’s article appeared in the Guardian, 8/9.)
Jude Law is the big draw in this outstanding revival of Eugene O'Neill's 1921 play. But Law's is only one in a triptych of fine performances, the others coming from Ruth Wilson and David Hayman, in a production by Rob Ashford that discovers the inner intensity of a play that can easily lapse into coarse melodrama.
Baldly summarised, O'Neill's plot sounds like one of those Victorian woman-with-a-past plays. The eponymous heroine is reunited with her father Chris, an old Scandinavian salt and now captain of a Provincetown coal barge, after a gap of 15 years.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/aug/09/anna-christie-review