ABOUT THE PLAY

 

David Suchet returned to the West End stage in Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer prize-winning masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, following his critically acclaimed performance in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons last year.  Directed by award-winning director Anthony Page, Eugene O’Neill’s semi autobiographical play paints a powerful portrait of a family tormented by the past and paralysed by its own personal demons.

 

Set in 1912, the story is a compelling family drama between James Tyrone (David Suchet), Mary Tyrone (Laurie Metcalf) and their sons, Jamie and Edmund (Kyle Soller) during a long summer’s day. This multi-award winning play is one of the greatest American plays written in the twentieth century.

 

CAST & CREATIVE

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James Tyrone - David Suchet

Mary Cavan Tyrone, His Wife  - Laurie Metcalf

James Tyrone, Jr., Their Elder Son  - Trevor White

Edmund Tyrone, Their Younger Son -  Kyle Soller

Cathleen, Second Girl  - Rosie Sansom

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Director - Anthony Page

Designer - Lez Brotherston

Lighting Designer - Mark Henderson

Sound Designer - Gareth Owen

 

 

QUOTES & REVIEWS

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At the end of this superb production of Eugene O’Neill’s harrowing autobiographical play, I barely had the strength to get out of my seat. Thedramatic impact is shattering. The raw pain, passion and even the occasional clumsiness of the writing are testament to a work of heroic honesty.

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O’Neill himself described it as being “written in tears and blood”. His wife said he was “tortured by the experience”, emerging from his study at the end of each day of writing “gaunt and sometimes weeping”.

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In this superbly judged and wonderfully acted production, which finds flickers of humour in the darkness as well as aching passages of desperate love, the director Anthony Page brings it in at under three hours, thanks to the fluency of the playing and some judicious cutting.

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As the title suggests, the play follows a single day in the life of the Tyrone family in their summer home in 1912, with the dramatist looking back on his own mother, father and older brother, all of them dead when he wrote it between 1939 and 1941, as well as his own younger self.

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It is a family racked by addiction, despair and festering guilt, but in the opening actO’Neill offers a heart-wrenching glimpse of hope. After years addicted to morphine, first prescribed to her when she gave birth to Edmund – O’Neill’s portrait of himself

as a young man – the mother, Mary, appears to have undergone a successful cure. Her actor husband James is palpably proud of her, and the two sons are less juiced up than usual. The production brilliantly captures the tension of characters walking on eggshells around each other, fearful that this brief moment of happiness will be short-lived.

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As indeed it is. Confronted by the knowledge that her younger son has TB, Mary retreats again into a comforting cloud of opiates and childhood memories. The two boys get roaring drunk, and James, too, hits the  bottle  hard,  lamenting  his  squandered  talents as an actor.

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As the anguished, tight-fisted father, David Suchet gives a performance of high-definition intensity, suddenly seeming physically diminished as expansive hope gives way to bitter despair. His eyes glow with love at one moment, spark with fury the next. And the passage in which he describes his dirt-poor childhood, which in part, at least, explains the meanness with money that possibly caused his wife’s addiction, and certainly explains his sell-out career, is overpoweringly moving.

 

The American actress Laurie Metcalf is equally remarkable  as  his  wife,  floating  around  the  stage like  a  distracted  ghost  as  she  escapes  her  pain with  hard  drugs  and  tender  memories  that  seem more real to her than the present. Meanwhile, Kyle Soller movingly captures the passion, fear and vulnerability of the young playwright, while Trevor White brings a terrifying, self-loathing viciousness to his brother, Jamie.

This  is  a  masterly  production  of  a  masterpiece. It isn’t easy to sit through, but the dramatic rewards are enormous.

Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph

 

This superb revival of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece has everything you could ask for in a drama: powerhouse performances, delicacy, great writing - and a tragic personal backstory.

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Dysfunctional families are the bleeding heart of serious drama but they are rarely so close to home as this one: O’Neill’s dramatisation of a day in the life of the Tyrone family, written in 1940 but not performed, by his own request, until after his death. O’Neill said his heavily autobiographical piece was written in ‘tears and blood’. And, watching the ‘tightwad’ old actor-father, the frail, ghostly mother, and the two self-destructive sons boozing, lying, trying to love each other  but ripping themselves apart, is a long and heartbreaking look at the private crucible that forgedAmerican’s first great naturalist playwright.

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David Suchet and Laurie Metcalf (formerly of ‘Poirot’ and ‘Roseanne’) are exceptional as the father and mother, James and Mary Tyrone. Suchet, his head held high and his voice full of Irish-American gravel, gives a profoundly sympathetic portrait based explicitly on O’Neill’s actor father James, who sold out for a hit role in ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’,  a poster of which hangs on his sitting room wall.

 

Tyrone is a man who has pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, chosencommercial success over art because of his impoverished childhood, and is now too mean to replace his shoelaces when they snap. Suchet shows the actor’s thespian dignity and his generous tenderness for his wife. But he is also funny and acute when playing the ham who, even in the extremes of drunken despair, poses at just the right angle beneath his sitting room light bulb when confessing his chief regret,that he ‘could have been a great Shakespearean’.

 

Metcalf, by contrast, gives a completely unsentimental portrayal of Mary, who begins the day shedding tremulous rays of hope over her husband and sons because she is in remission from her prescription drug addiction, and ends it freaking out like a degraded elderly Ophelia on dope. In O’Neill’s play, Mary and her sonsblame ‘tightwad’ Dad for everything, including her addiction to morphine. But Anthony Page’s insightful production shows that Mary is the real horror in their home.

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Metcalf is unsparing: her grace, elegance and faded beauty make it even more horrible when she pours out sweet poison under the influence of the drug, berating her sons for being born and dragging them down into her fog. (Trevor White and Kyle Soller are excellent as her devastated boys, no-good 30-something Jamie and consumptive young Edmund who may yet, as his father hopes, have ‘themakings of a poet’.)

 

The greatness in O’Neill’s play - and in the American drama that it fathered - is its comprehension of the human cost of progress and indeed success in a country which prides itself on being self-made.

‘The past is the present’, says Mary, whose drugs help her wish herself back to her convent girlhood. But that’s not the whole truth: O’Neill writes his family as crawling between the past and the future; striving to make it from what they havebeen to what they long to be; unable, except in moments of supreme self-sacrifice,to be more than what they are. His scorchingly honest portrait of them seems compelled by love as much as despair, which is why the experience of watching it is never depressing.

 

This beautifully acted revival of ‘Long Day’s Journey’ sends you into the night elated, with the sense of something understood.

Time Out

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