How to approach Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night? “At our very first reading,” wrote Michael Blakemore, who directed a famous National Theatre production in 1971, “I encouraged the cast not to regard the play as some great tragic Everest waiting to be climbed.” Those are wise words that I hope Jeremy Herrin, directing a new production with Brian Cox and Patricia Clarkson, opening at Wyndham’s theatre in London, takes to heart.
Of course, it is a great play. But, having seen half a dozen productions, I would suggest that it works best when you realise that, within a classical structure, it contains all the anguish of family life. You could argue that O’Neill’s characters are exceptional: the father is a miserly actor who has wasted his potential, his wife is a morphine addict and their elder and younger sons are, respectively, a cynical barfly and a consumptive poet. But Blakemore again hits the nail on the head when, in his book Stage Blood, he praises the play’s democracy of spirit and claims that all you need to understand it is “the experience of being a member of a family”.
While the play is essentially realistic, there is also a calculated symbolism in its progress from bright, confident morning to a final fogbound descent into midnight despair. The clue lies in the title. It is a long day’s journey and the one production that short-circuited that element was Jonathan Miller’s in 1986. It boasted fine performances from Jack Lemmon as James Tyrone and from Kevin Spacey as his wastrel elder son. But, by cutting the running time to under three hours through the use of overlapping dialogue, it fractured the play’s rhythm and blurred key plot points: it was never clear that Mary Tyrone’s addiction was prompted by her husband’s engagement of a cheap doctor when she was giving birth to her second son.
In the main, however, local productions have done rich justice to this landmark play often by an astute mix of British and American actors in the leads. In the National’s 1971 version, Olivier was an unforgettable James Tyrone: what I especially remember was his evocation of the character’s wasted talent so that when he sweetly crooned: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” you suddenly believed this old matinee idol could have been an American Kean. But Olivier was matched by an authentically American Constance Cummings who movingly suggested that the convent-educated Mary had sacrificed her religious faith to her devotion to a touring actor.
That Anglo-American mix was echoed in a 2000 West End production by Robin Phillips in which Jessica Lange’s Mary was partnered by Charles Dance as James and again the blend worked. In a magnificently unsentimental performance, Lange suggested Mary was as much vampire as victim: her endless reminders of her husband’s original sin and of Edmund’s filial guilt intensified the domestic agony while Dance caught perfectly James’s rueful sadness. And in Anthony Page’s 2012 revival, David Suchet highlighted Tyrone’s forlorn passion while the Chicago-based Laurie Metcalf as Mary memorably declined as the day wore on from a chirpy gaiety to the violent mood-swings of the deluded addict.
I am not suggesting that a cultural mix is imperative. In 1991 at the National Timothy West and Prunella Scales brought their own experience of married life to a play about indissoluble familial bonds. And in Richard Eyre’s production – first seen in Bristol in 2016 then in the West End and much the best of recent times – Jeremy Irons and Lesley Manville made a formidable pairing. Irons moved one by his powerlessness to reach out to a woman he still passionately adored. Meanwhile Manville astonished one by her painful iteration of the word “home” as if craving domestic constancy and haunted by the memory of her lost religious faith.
For brevity’s sake, I have defined productions by their leads and ignored the equally crucial casting of their sons. I have also skirted round two of the themes that define this play and that recur in great drama from ancient Greece to the modern US: the stranglehold of the past over the present and the constant battle between lies and illusion. But, however you cast it and wherever you lay the emphasis, it remains one of the greatest plays ever written about the contradictions of family life with its oscillations between forgiveness and despair. In that sense it is not, as Blakemore says, “a tragic Everest” but an all too recognisable human drama.
• Long Day’s Journey Into Night is at Wyndham’s theatre, London, 19 March-8 June
