Review: LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, The Wyndham’s Theatre
Johan Persson
Award-winning director Jeremy Herrin directs a formidable new production of the American classic Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Eugene O’Neill’s magnum opus, often regarded as the ‘greatest American play of the 20th century’, shows the unravelling of a family stricken by addiction, disease and regret, over the course of a long summer’s day.
The weight of talent behind this new production is undeniable – but the show is fundamentally weighed down by an unwieldy script packed with laboured metaphors worn thin by relentless repetition.
Although the play hinges on the crippling morphine addiction of the matriarch Mary Tyrone, Patricia Clarkson is relegated to an offstage role for considerable portions of the show. When she emerges, Clarkson is a haunting wisp of a woman, stammering, fragile and forgetful. She cuts a pathetic figure, her vulnerability tempering the boozy, brash aggression of the male-dominated house, spearheaded by James Tyrone (Brian Cox). There’s more than an echo of Cox’s Emmy award winning performance as Logan Roy in this production, and Tyrone’s bemoaning of a career defining role that left him stifled by type casting sent a ripple of knowing smirks throughout the crowd.
Laurie Kynaston stands out as Edmund, the younger Tyrone brother, afflicted by consumption and hope. Kynaston brings a scampish younger sibling energy to his role, his renegade interest in radical philosophy and poetry at odds with his father’s phlegmatic household governance and traditional views of masculine worth.
Daryl McCormack looms broodily over his fellow cast members as the eldest son Jamie. Next to Cox’s raging father figure, McCormack wears his shame and disappointment with himself and his lot in life with dry humour and self-deprecation, along with a faintly ridiculous prosthetic paunch. It is particularly in the relationship between James Tyrone Senior and Junior that we see the archetypal American family drama play out – the self-made man alienating the younger generation with his tyrannical obsession with industry, worth and sacrifice. We’ve seen it played out in a dozen Arthur Miller plays, and the aforementioned Succession – works which no doubt draw inspiration from O’Neill, but vastly improve upon his work.
Louisa Harland brings some welcome levity as the irreverent, whiskey quaffing Irish maid. Indeed, Herrin and his cast do well to find the comic beats in this melodrama. In its lighter moments, this show trips along and shows the warmth and affection that glue this family together - barely visible and peeling apart but certainly there.
The title of this show should be heeded - this is certainly not a short day’s journey into night. There is obviously no correlation between play length and quality, but the repetitive and circular arguments (although befitting of a family trapped in a cycle of toxic behaviour) make the show drag, particularly in the inexorable second half. Jeremy Herrin would do well to wield some shears and prune this beast.
A unique opportunity to see a blinding cast of stars in one of the most important plays of the last century.
*** Three Stars
Rviewed by Livvy Perrett
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