This is a review of the 2012 production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night which was first staged at the Apollo Theatre in London; I watched it on Digital Theatre.
It was magnificent.
It is set over the course of a single day. There's a simple single set, the drawing room. There is a cast of four principals, the family members, and their maid.
James Tyrone (David Suchet) is a successful American actor. It transpires that his success is based on his performance of a single role; he could have been a great actor but he allowed himself to become typecast because his dirt-poor Irish immigrant upbringing has left him with a dread of ending up in the poor house; as a result he has become miserly, turning off electric lights and always chasing bargains, many of which are illusory (you get what you pay for). In particular, he chose a cheap doctor to attend to his wife when she was in pain from giving birth to her youngest son, Edmund, and now she is a morphine addict.
The way that Laurie Metcalf played Mary Tyrone was the performance of the play, one of the best performances I have seen for a long while. At the start, you wouldn't know anything is wrong and you wonder why the male members of her family are so concerned with her sleeping in the spare room. Microstep by microstep she begins to unravel. She twitches. She flinches. Later, filled with the drug, she is serene. She might have started off falsely cheerful but towards the end her mood oscillates and she speaks without any curb on what she thinks. It was a wonderful piece of acting.
The plot revolves around the fact that Edmund, the younger son, who has a persistent cough, is going to see the doctor. The threat of consumption lies heavy. Mary’s father died of it. Jamie, the older son, pleads with his dad not to be a tightwad and to choose the best of sanitoria, not to let his Irish peasant origins tell him that a diagnosis of TB is a death sentence so why waste money? And the males, fearful that she might break down completely, conspire to let Mary persist in her deluded belief that Edmund just has a heavy cold.
This is a play where there is tension between each and every one of the family members but also tension within each of them. James regrets his missed opportunities. Mary regrets having Edmund (their second son, Eugene, died when Jamie infected him with measles). James and Mary love one another even as they recognise that each is destroying themselves and the marriage. Jamie is torn between jealousy of Edmund and loving him. Edmund recognises that he will never be the great writer he aspires to be.
It was a mesmerising play and well worthy of its status as an American classic.
It was magnificent.
It is set over the course of a single day. There's a simple single set, the drawing room. There is a cast of four principals, the family members, and their maid.
James Tyrone (David Suchet) is a successful American actor. It transpires that his success is based on his performance of a single role; he could have been a great actor but he allowed himself to become typecast because his dirt-poor Irish immigrant upbringing has left him with a dread of ending up in the poor house; as a result he has become miserly, turning off electric lights and always chasing bargains, many of which are illusory (you get what you pay for). In particular, he chose a cheap doctor to attend to his wife when she was in pain from giving birth to her youngest son, Edmund, and now she is a morphine addict.
The way that Laurie Metcalf played Mary Tyrone was the performance of the play, one of the best performances I have seen for a long while. At the start, you wouldn't know anything is wrong and you wonder why the male members of her family are so concerned with her sleeping in the spare room. Microstep by microstep she begins to unravel. She twitches. She flinches. Later, filled with the drug, she is serene. She might have started off falsely cheerful but towards the end her mood oscillates and she speaks without any curb on what she thinks. It was a wonderful piece of acting.
The plot revolves around the fact that Edmund, the younger son, who has a persistent cough, is going to see the doctor. The threat of consumption lies heavy. Mary’s father died of it. Jamie, the older son, pleads with his dad not to be a tightwad and to choose the best of sanitoria, not to let his Irish peasant origins tell him that a diagnosis of TB is a death sentence so why waste money? And the males, fearful that she might break down completely, conspire to let Mary persist in her deluded belief that Edmund just has a heavy cold.
This is a play where there is tension between each and every one of the family members but also tension within each of them. James regrets his missed opportunities. Mary regrets having Edmund (their second son, Eugene, died when Jamie infected him with measles). James and Mary love one another even as they recognise that each is destroying themselves and the marriage. Jamie is torn between jealousy of Edmund and loving him. Edmund recognises that he will never be the great writer he aspires to be.
It was a mesmerising play and well worthy of its status as an American classic.
O’Neill won the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature and four Pulitzer Prizes. Although the play was premiered in 1956, it was written between 1939 and 1941. By the time of its first performance, O’Neill was dead. Perhaps the play was just too close to home.
O’Neill’s father, James, was an Irish immigrant actor who had played Othello with legendary actor Edwin Booth, as James Tyrone says he did in the play; James O’Neill then played the lead in The Count of Monte Cristo which became a touring phenomenon; it made him rich at the cost of his art. The family summer home, where they would unite every year just as the Tyrones do in the play, was called Monte Cristo cottage.
O’Neill’s mother was called Mary, as in the play. She suffered from morphine addiction, prescribed to ease the pain of the birth of her third son, Eugene himself.
Eugene himself, like Edward in the play, spent several years as a sailor at sea. He had to go to a sanatorium where he recovered from consumption. His elder brother Jamie was an alcoholic.
O’Neill’s father, James, was an Irish immigrant actor who had played Othello with legendary actor Edwin Booth, as James Tyrone says he did in the play; James O’Neill then played the lead in The Count of Monte Cristo which became a touring phenomenon; it made him rich at the cost of his art. The family summer home, where they would unite every year just as the Tyrones do in the play, was called Monte Cristo cottage.
O’Neill’s mother was called Mary, as in the play. She suffered from morphine addiction, prescribed to ease the pain of the birth of her third son, Eugene himself.
Eugene himself, like Edward in the play, spent several years as a sailor at sea. He had to go to a sanatorium where he recovered from consumption. His elder brother Jamie was an alcoholic.
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