Desire Under the Elms runs at the Almeida Theatre from 10 November to 19 December 2026, the last of its announced season.
Eugene O’Neill wrote Desire Under the Elms in 1924 and took the plot from Greek tragedy — Phaedra, Hippolytus and Theseus — and moved it to a stony New England farm in 1850. An old farmer brings home a young third wife. His youngest son is still on the land, waiting for it. The two of them fall into an affair and produce a child, and the play works its way to the ending that plot has always had. It was prosecuted for obscenity, which in 1925 was how America reviewed things.
O’Neill is the writer American drama begins with, and this is the play where he stopped experimenting with form and started writing families destroying each other, and he did it for the rest of his life. He won four Pulitzers and the Nobel, and remains the only American playwright to have taken the latter, which is a fact about the writing rather than about the awards.
It runs at the Almeida Theatre from Tuesday 10 November to Saturday 19 December 2026, taking the theatre’s winter slot and closing on the Saturday before Christmas. The Almeida has spent two decades making its name on American plays of this period given to English casts, and Odets, O’Neill and Miller have all been through the building in that time. The Almeida holds three hundred and twenty-five people and no seat is far from the stage.