Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, the play where he began writing families destroying each other, closes the Almeida's American season this winter.
Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, a Greek tragedy transplanted to a New England farm, closes the Almeida Theatre’s autumn season in Islington from Tuesday 10 November 2026.
O’Neill took the plot of Phaedra, Hippolytus and Theseus and set it on a stony farm in 1850. An old farmer brings home a young third wife, and his youngest son, who expects to inherit the land, begins an affair with her. A child follows, and the play moves towards the ending that plot has always had.
Written in 1924, the play premiered in 1925 and was prosecuted for obscenity within a year. It is where O’Neill stopped experimenting with form and began writing families destroying each other, his subject from then on. He won four Pulitzer Prizes and remains the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Almeida has spent two decades staging American plays of this period with English casts. Odets, O’Neill and Miller have all passed through the building in that time.
This production runs until Saturday 19 December 2026 in a house of 325 seats, where nobody sits far from the stage.