LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
Bristol Old Vic
Opened 29 March, 2016
***

The glass in the windows is misted, the timber of the walls at once reflective and semi-transparent; the dowdy browns of the parlour recede to the shadowy cobalt blues of an uncertain distance. Rob Howell’s design locates the Tyrone family of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece in a world at once natural and quasi-mystical. It matches O’Neill’s writing: he never gets airy-fairy, but is also never afraid to follow his ideas towards what would be a high-flown stratosphere but for the ever-present, plummeting tug of the gravity of failure. No-one ever went to an O’Neill play for either laughter or pepping-up.

Richard Eyre’s excellent programme note describes this as “the saddest play ever written”, and his production makes a plausible case for the claim. The Tyrone family consists of a drunken has-been actor father, an even more drunken no-hoper elder son, his bitter consumptive brother and their mentally ill morphine addict mother. They are partly inspired by O’Neill’s own family. (Whoopee.)

Eyre’s Bristol revival boasts a high-calibre set of parents. As James Tyrone, Jeremy Irons deploys possibly the least “bogtrotter” (Jamie junior’s word) Irish-American accent I have ever heard. On press night, his lines were far from perfect, including a prompt from his younger son and a repetition of a passage he’d spoken several minutes earlier... but it is a long day’s journey, after all, which Eyre and his cast do well to complete in only three and a quarter hours. Irons is one of the great “technician” actors, which gives us a firm idea of Tyrone’s general character but can leave him a little short at those moments of emotional candour. Not so Lesley Manville as his wife Mary, who navigates her way expertly from defensively cheerful garrulity through showing the cracks to her final drugged, dissociative monologue. Ultimately, too, she is no more imprisoned by her delusions and fears than the rest of the family.

It takes a lot to make this colossal grind of a work of genius compelling; Eyre and company hit it at moments, and never fail to put their hefty shoulders into the effort.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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