Ran into a brick wall about halfway through this one and then spotted the Nina (referenced in 9), which got things moving again. Still don’t understand a few things here and there though.

I struggled to get going with this, only solving one of the Across clues on my first pass. A few nice, long cryptic definitions eventually got the ball rolling and everything else then fell into place. Good stuff as usual, though the wordplay in one clue (22A) has me stumped, which is a rarity for Phi I must say!

Not too troublesome today - one or two pleasing clues with a few rather obvious ones.

ACROSS

1.    TAFFRAIL - <fat-frail (upper part of the stern of a ship)
5.    STASIS -  dd. (East German secret police, suspended animation)
9.    REINVENT - rein, vent
10.  VIRAGO - ( Virgo with ‘a’)
11.  ADHESIVE - a -d-hes-ive - (a dive in the sense of a low class club etc)
12.  omitted
14.  STONEHENGE - *gets around one-hen ( This was rather neat, I thought)
18.  FIELD EVENT- def., as opposed to track event
22.  LOOK ON - o.k. within loon (American name for a diving bird)
23.  CAREFREE - (s) care - free.
24.   omitted
25.  TINCTURE - dd. ( or maybe treble, a solution of alcohol and water, a trace or smattering, a dye or pigment)
26.  TURRET-  *utter with r from revived
27.  ENGENDER - very obvious one with e-ng-ender.

DOWN

1.    TURBAN - t-urban
2,16.  FLIGHT RECORDER  dd (black box used to track aircraft’s history after crash, for instance)
3.   RAVISH - vi within rash ( reminds me of a time many years ago at University when I declared
to friends that a dishy professor had ‘ravished me with a smile.’  An early example of my misuse of words - truly!                                      
4.   INNOVATIVE-  In -Nov  <Evita (Another inventive clue )
6.   TWILIGHT - Not sure of the word-play here.  Twilight Zone is a well-known American TV series
which no doubt has many followers but could do with an explanation of the clue.
7,20. STAMPING  GROUND  * mad pigs grunt on
8.   SHOULDER - should -er ( to bear in sense of carry)
13. INUNDATE- i-n-und-ation (German word for’and’ within 1 nation)
15. AFFLUENT - effluent with change of first letter
17. ADVOCATE - ad-vo-ca-te
19. RESCUE  (rest-cue , with t(ime) removed)2
21. METEOR   *remote

 A nice twist in a crossword with conventional clues (no misprints, extra words etc. to muddy the waters). The puzzle was made more difficult by the fact that I found the clues in the top half easier to solve than those in the bottom half, so the author only appeared late in my labours on the bottom line.

As soon as EUGENE O’NEILL had made an appearance, MOURNING rang the “Mourning Becomes Electra” bell, and it dawned on me that we were supposed to metamorphose  MOURNING into ELECTRA. Amazingly this metamorphosed all the crossing down words into other valid words, which must have taken some time for Dysart to compile!

O’Neill was indebted for his plot to AESCHYLUS, who appeared in the right hand column, minus his H, which had to be inserted after ELECTRA. The character hiding was ORESTES who appeared diagonally down starting at the O below the 14 square.

 Solving time : A very on-and-off effort. 2.5 hours altogether?