Long Day’s Journey Into Night shoulders itself on to the stage: shaggy, heavy-footed, a creature of the last century. Yet braying prophetically. Eugene O’Neill wrote the play between 1939 and 1941 as an act of “old sorrow, written in tears and blood”. He didn’t want it performed but his third wife, against his wishes, authorised a posthumous production in 1956. The rawly autobiographical work features a mother addicted to morphine, a father entranced by memories of himself as a classical actor, one tubercular and one alcoholic son; the pain of it can be gauged by the fact that a dead baby is called Eugene. It also provides an unforgettable image of an American mother: a “dope fiend” in a rocking chair.
Jeremy Herrin’s production is careful, slowly gathering – and three-and-a-half hours long. The opening scenes are muted, not so much anguished as anxious; Lizzie Clachan’s marine-coloured clapboard design is austere and confined. The great sound of the foghorn out at sea – the key note of a family adrift – is no more than a spectral whisper and the dialogue often falters; when power does switch on, it is at first in the monologues. Solo confessions are the motor of the play but they gain in intensity with a greater sense of family – of inherited and inescapable dysfunction – than there is here. The wounds look grave, not – as they should – fatal.
