Eugene O’Neill’s classic family drama, which has such close parallels with his own family history, here gets a stunning presentation under the direction of Jeremy Herrin. It is set in 1912 in the Connecticut country home of the Tyrone family which successful actor James Tyrone built as a retreat, despite the fact that his wife Mary didn’t like the place. She says it has never felt like a home, but nevertheless they come here every summer.
With them are their sons: James, who followed his father into the profession, and younger brother Edmund, a writer. His father thought James had talent, but drinking and whoring have stopped it from flowering, while Edmund is a failed poet with tuberculosis, a fact that he tries to hide from his mother by feigning a cold lest the truth should upset her, for she has only recently returned from a sanatorium after treatment for addiction and her father died of the same disease.
It is a household full of tensions and of love too, but James senior never seems to let up on his criticism of his sons and their failure while regretting his own failure to follow early success as Othello with more Shakespeare instead of the crowd-pleaser role that he stayed with too long. Jamie rails agains his father’s stinginess, blaming his choice of a cheap doctor for his mother’s addiction and brother's illness. The three men are always arguing, from which Mary has her own form of escape.
Lizzie Clachan’s setting of wood walls framing another wood wall beyond them, with no visible doors or windows, sometimes suggests a trap that none of them can escape from, while at the same time each seems to be in their own box. These are also surfaces on which Jack Knowles's light and shade can trace the passing hours of the play, which takes place in one room through one day.
Brian Cox is an excellent Tyrone. You know how well he would have commanded the whole house as a popular player—and O’Neill neatly places him as old school with his distaste for incoming writers like Ibsen. He sees himself in command of the family, in which he’s frustrated, getting overbearing and angry at opposition but able to suddenly switch to true tenderness, especially with Mary. You believe he still loves her while she declares “I love you too dear—in spite of everything.”
Patricia Clarkson’s Mary seems a delicate creature, especially when set against her husband’s actorly projection, her body language precise. She escapes into the past, to times that were happy. This particular Long Day they certainly aren’t. “There is a gloom in the air you could cut with,” says James, and the mists that drift in from the sea and the lighting (Tyrone unscrews light bulbs from a chandelier to keep the bills down) underlines this.
Young Jamie (well, he’s 33) may be a wastrel, but Daryl McCormack makes him a likeable drunkard, and, as he expresses his feelings for Edmund, you believe seeing himself in the big brother role isn’t just a performance. With Laurie Kynaston as Edmund, who says he used to idolise the elder, this becomes a believable pairing.
Both sons and their father are ever watchful of Mary’s actions as she invents cover for her addiction, but when she settles down with their Irish maid Catherine (made lively by Louisa Harland), they seem to have fun together, and finally it is the audience that this Mary confides in.
Lasting three and a half hours, Long Day’s Journey Into Night makes demands of the audience as well as the cast. Those used to 90-minute plays with no big speeches may find it a challenge, but the effort is well worth it. These are fine performances in a clear-headed production of a major work that finds humour at many points, however dark it is overall.