DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS By Eugene O'Neill, Directed by Patrick Mason. First performance at the Greenwich Theatre, May 6, 1987 EMPHRAIM: Tom Hickey PETER CABOT: Richard Cordery SIMEON: Sam Douglas ABBIE: Carmen du Sautoy EBEN: Colin Firth

 A harsh Old Testament ethic governs the Cabots, a family of New England farmers tilling unyielding New England soil in the mid-nineteenth century. "God's hard, not easy? God's in the stones!" says Ephraim, 76 year old head of this dour dynasty. Eugene O'Neill was precise about the setting of his bleak story, with its clamorous echoes of Greek tragedy: the Cabot's peeling farmhouse was to be overhung with "appalling humaneness" by the eponymous trees. Joe Vanek's design dispenses with the symbolic arbour, and indeed with various farmhouse interiors, and givers us instead an open-plan space of minimalist pleached pine like an architect's New york loft.

 In this stark settin, the three Cabot sons brood and nurture their lust - for land. Skinflint Ephraim, played a touch like Gabby Hayes by Tom Hickey, hugs his farm to him and enslaves his sons, who wait only for his death and their inheritance. They plot their escape and revenge huddled round a fire, their figures dwarfed by the looming shadows which suggest the free men they wish they were. As the elder sons Peter and Simeon, Richard Cordery and Sam Douglas convey a palpable rapport and provide the only moments of humour. Their early departure in search of California gold gave the audience, if not the Cabots, cause for regret.

 The longed for inheritance recedes when Ephraim brings home his new - third - wife Abbie, a woman half his age and twice as calculating. O'Neill wrote of Abbie's face as "pretty but marred by its rather gross sensuality", a description which does not immediately suggest the refined features of Carmen du Sautoy. In attempting to convey the greed born of hardship, the longing and ultimate ruthlessness of Abbie, Miss du Sautoy also had to struggle with her accent, frequently straying from the American Mid-West to the English Home Counties and back again.

 Abbie and the remaining son, Eben, played with a remarkable intensity by Colin Firth, square up to each other as adversaries, ready to do battle over the future ownership of the farm. Eben's bitterness is sharpened by obsessive love for his dead mother who, he constantly asserts, was the rightful owner of the land. He is also in the habit of talking to his deceased mother, asking for guidance and swearing vengeance. In imbuing Eben's faintly ridiculous Oedipal tendencies with a pathetic dignity, Firth's performance is all the more creditable. Soon, stepmother and stepson are swapping kisses instead of insults.

In this harsh, unforgiving terrain such a sin must exact a terrible price. In attempting to build the tension, director Patrick Mason abandons O'Neill's structure and runs the play as one long scene. The device certainly sends the action hurtling headlong, but it also destroys any sense of the passage of time, sometimes with ludicrous results. Seconds after the first incestuous kiss, for instance, the neighbours are dashing in to celebrate the birth of the child of this illicit liaison. But as for the heavy-handed symbolism and the occasionally fragile plotting, the responsibility must lie with O'Neill.