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.