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The long journey from day to night
Wyndham Theatre, London
Has there ever been a work with a better title? Eugene O’Neill’s 1941 American autobiographical drama, now starring Brian Cox as actor, director, 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 dreary, miserable ultramarathon that will likely leave you feeling defeated and inspire awe.
Cox has cornered the dysfunctional dad market after four seasons as monstrous media mogul Logan Roy on TV’s Succession. Here, however, he steps back in time as James Tyrone, a miserly former actor-manager in 1912, left with nothing in retirement but faded memories of past glories and the semi-comic conviction that his beloved Shakespeare was a good Irish Catholic. .
His wife Mary (Patricia Clarkson, of The Station Agent and Good Night And Good Luck) is a melancholic former schoolgirl who has now become addicted to opium to treat her arthritis. And his two sons (Daryl McCormack of Bad Sister on Apple TV+ and rising star Laurie Kynaston) are dipsomaniacal vagabonds: one has a taste for prostitutes and the other suffers from tuberculosis (or ‘consumption’ as it was known then). .
Eugene O’Neill’s 1941 autobiographical American drama, now starring Brian Cox as actor, director and patriarch of a dysfunctional family, is sometimes hailed as one of the greatest works of the 20th century.
But at three and a half hours it can also feel like a dreary, miserable ultramarathon that will likely leave you feeling defeated and inspire awe. Brian Cox pictured with co-star Patricia Clarkson
Cox has cornered the dysfunctional dad market after four seasons as monstrous media mogul Logan Roy on TV’s Succession.
Now 77 years old, Cox remains a force to be reckoned with in a character who is supposed to be 65 years old. Like Logan Roy, he is a wandering volcano looking for an excuse to erupt. When he attacks his two children for his lack of ambition, his eyes protrude from the stalks a good meter away. And yet, unlike Roy, he has a softer, sentimental side, and remembers how he ruined his theater career by playing it safe, for money.
He also shows great tenderness and charm with Clarkson as his beloved Mary, a woman who married below her station. She has the most interesting role, tormented by the loss of a child and spending time playing the piano to admire the nuns at school, and calming her occasional anger with wry humor. However, even she is becoming more and more mysterious.
Most of Cox’s anger is focused on the boys. McCormack’s shifty-eyed older brother Jamie greets him with a combination of deference, evasion, and deception. Kynaston’s younger brother Edmund, O’Neillish’s role of the tortured writer, holds his own with Cox, combining his father’s Shakespeare quote with Baudelaire’s more somber poetry. Thank goodness, therefore, for Derry Girls’ Louisa Harland’s touches of Irish humor as a subversive maid.
There was nothing wrong with the performance then, but Jeremy Herrin’s moody production still left me feeling buried alive in the stark, coffin-like ensemble of undecorated boards and gray-green and beige costumes. It’s as if all four characters had lost hope before the show even started. Sitting drinking endless volumes of whiskey, everyone is gawking as they dig deeper and deeper holes.
So, as a distant foghorn beckons you into the night, and the fog rolls in from the Atlantic Ocean “like the ghost of the sea,” this is a pretty good approximation of purgatory, and not an experience I can in good conscience recommend to anyone. someone.