Long Day's Journey into Night

by Eugene O'Neill

seen at Wynndhams Theatre on 18 February 2018

Richard Eyre directs Jeremy Irons as James Tyrone, Lesley Manville as his wife Mary, Rory Keenan as Jamie and Matthew Beard as Edmund, the two Tyrone sons, and Jessica Regan as Cathleen the maid, in a production designed by Rob Howell.

The play, loosely autobiographical, takes place in the Tyrone's summer house on the day in which Edmund is told by the family doctor that he has consumption. But both his brother and his father have half suspected this (indeed, he may himself have been aware of the likelihood); the menfolk are furthermore confronting the fact that Mary is incurably addicted to morphine, having been prescribe it many years before after Edmund's difficult birth.

Such a bald summary hardly begins to account for the play's power, nor for the unremitting portrayal of self-deception and mutual recrimination that unfolds before us as the various members of the family try to maintain a veneer of normality in the face of long years of denial, repressed anger, and tortured love.

The cast are all splendid. Lesley Manville's Mary is eerily fragile as she attempts to disguise her lapse into drug taking, and to maintain her conviction that Edmund is only suffering from a 'summer cold'. The others are trying to shield her from the real gravity of her younger son's condition, in the vain hope that this will help her not to relapse - but it becomes painfully clear that they are too late; the relapse has begun before the play opens. Mary gradually subsides into a well of loneliness and a reliving of early events in her life, a condition the men ruefully acknowledge as 'fading' from them.

Jeremy Irons as the patriarch James combines garrulousness, parsimony, anger, and baffled affection with consummate ease. The contradictions of his life, rooted in early deprivation, have in part caused his problems, but he is no position to acknowledge this. Part of the play's brilliance is to show us this impasse without increasing the self-awareness of the character. While his sons, and even his wife, can accuse him of miserliness in using the cheapest doctors for advice, and laugh at his insistence on using as few electric light bulbs as possible, he can see nothing odd about expansively offering his son the best sanatorium possible, but immediately adding 'within reason' - confirming Edmund's claim that he will not spend much when he knows that consumption is incurable anyway.

The two sons are hardly beacons of promise - Jamie all too often drunk and womanising, Edmund lost in illness and Nietzsche. Their ambivalence towards their father, their hurt exasperation with their mother, and their own awkward sibling rivalry, are very well conveyed by the two young actors taking their parts. The sudden explosion of violence towards the end is completely believable, fuelled by years of tension and this particular night's indulgence in drinking.

Such desperation, such wordy introspection and mutual recrimination, such ruined lives, could lead to a debilitating and emotionally draining experience. Draining, in some respects, it is (at nearly 3.5 hours), but by no means debilitating. In the hands of this director and these actors, one comes away impressed by O'Neill's theatrical skill, and his somehow merciless but compassionate insight into a family whose lives are fraught with emotional trouble.