Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Wyndham’s Theatre, London
Was ever a play better titled? Eugene O’Neill’s 1941 autobiographical American drama now starring Brian Cox as an actor-manager and patriarch of a dysfunctional family is sometimes hailed as one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. But at three-and-a-half hours it can also feel like a cheerless misery ultra-marathon that’s as likely to leave you feeling defeated as it is to inspire awe.
Cox has cornered the market in dysfunctional dads after four seasons as the monstrous media mogul Logan Roy in Succession on TV. Here though he goes down-market and back in time as James Tyrone, a miserly former actor-manager in 1912, left with nothing in retirement but faded memories of former glories and the semi-comic conviction that his beloved Shakespeare was a good Irish Catholic.
His wife Mary (Patricia Clarkson, from The Station Agent and Good Night And Good Luck) is a wistful former convent school girl who has now become addicted to opium to treat her arthritis. And their two sons (Daryl McCormack from Bad Sister on Apple TV+ and rising star Laurie Kynaston) are dipsomaniac drifters - one with a taste for prostitutes, the other suffering from tuberculosis (or ‘consumption’ as it was then known).
Eugene O’Neill’s 1941 autobiographical American drama now starring Brian Cox as an actor-manager and patriarch of a dysfunctional family is sometimes hailed as one of the greatest plays of the 20th century
But at three-and-a-half hours it can also feel like a cheerless misery ultra-marathon that’s as likely to leave you feeling defeated as it is to inspire awe. Brian Cox pictured with co-star Patricia Clarkson
Cox has cornered the market in dysfunctional dads after four seasons as the monstrous media mogul Logan Roy in Succession on TV
Now aged 77, Cox remains a force to be reckoned with in a character that’s supposed to be 65. Not unlike Logan Roy, he is a roving volcano looking for an excuse to erupt. When he kicks off at his two boys for their lack of ambition, his eyeballs stand out on stalks a good yard in advance. And yet, unlike Roy, he has a softer, sentimental side, recalling how he wrecked his stage career by playing it safe, for money.
He also shows great tenderness and charm around Clarkson as his beloved Mary, a woman who married beneath her station. She has the most interesting role, haunted by the loss of a child and her past playing piano for admiring nuns at school, and stilling her occasional rage with wry humour. Yet even she proves ever more numinous.
Most of Cox’s fury is focused on the boys. It is met by McCormack’s shifty-eyed older brother Jamie with a combination of deference, avoidance and deceit. Kynaston’s younger brother Edmund – the O’Neillish role of the tortured writer – holds his own with Cox, meeting his father’s quotation of Shakespeare with the bleaker poetry of Baudelaire. Thank God, therefore, for touches of Irish humour from Derry Girls’ Louisa Harland as a subversive maid.
Nothing wrong with the acting then, but still Jeremy Herrin’s morose production left me feeling buried alive in Lizzie Clachan’s dour, coffin-like set of undecorated boards and costumes of greyed-out greens and beige. It’s as though all four characters have given up hope before the show has even started. Sitting down to guzzle endless volumes of whisky, it’s all jaw-jaw as they dig ever deeper pits.
So, as a distant fog horn calls them into the night, and mist rolls in off the Atlantic Ocean ‘like the ghost of the sea’, this is a pretty good approximation to purgatory - and not an experience I can in good conscience recommend to anyone.
Surprise! Zendaya unveils SECOND red carpet look at Met Gala as she wows in corseted off
Palestinian death toll in Gaza rises to 31,490: ministry
Blinken assures US support of Black Sea allies as Ukraine urges military aid during conference
World Asia Esports Championship scheduled for September in China
Nadal says he's 'ready enough' to play in his last Barcelona Open
Nyingchi greets peach blossoms
Luis Miranda Jr. reflects on giving, the arts and his son Lin
Azerbaijan urges top UN court to toss out Armenian case alleging racial discrimination
Demi Lovato dazzles in metallic Prabal Gurung gown at 2024 Met Gala
Sparking youthful passion for the stage