Current location:entertainment >>
Succession's Brian Cox stars in an American stage epic... but at three
entertainment6252People have gathered around
IntroductionLong Day’s Journey Into NightWyndham’s Theatre, LondonRating: Was ever a play better titled? Eugene ...
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Wyndham’s Theatre, London
Was ever a play better titled? Eugene O’Neill’s 1941 autobiographical American drama now starring Brian Cox as an actor-manager and patriarch of a dysfunctional family is sometimes hailed as one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. But at three-and-a-half hours it can also feel like a cheerless misery ultra-marathon that’s as likely to leave you feeling defeated as it is to inspire awe.
Cox has cornered the market in dysfunctional dads after four seasons as the monstrous media mogul Logan Roy in Succession on TV. Here though he goes down-market and back in time as James Tyrone, a miserly former actor-manager in 1912, left with nothing in retirement but faded memories of former glories and the semi-comic conviction that his beloved Shakespeare was a good Irish Catholic.
His wife Mary (Patricia Clarkson, from The Station Agent and Good Night And Good Luck) is a wistful former convent school girl who has now become addicted to opium to treat her arthritis. And their two sons (Daryl McCormack from Bad Sister on Apple TV+ and rising star Laurie Kynaston) are dipsomaniac drifters - one with a taste for prostitutes, the other suffering from tuberculosis (or ‘consumption’ as it was then known).
Eugene O’Neill’s 1941 autobiographical American drama now starring Brian Cox as an actor-manager and patriarch of a dysfunctional family is sometimes hailed as one of the greatest plays of the 20th century
But at three-and-a-half hours it can also feel like a cheerless misery ultra-marathon that’s as likely to leave you feeling defeated as it is to inspire awe. Brian Cox pictured with co-star Patricia Clarkson
Cox has cornered the market in dysfunctional dads after four seasons as the monstrous media mogul Logan Roy in Succession on TV
Now aged 77, Cox remains a force to be reckoned with in a character that’s supposed to be 65. Not unlike Logan Roy, he is a roving volcano looking for an excuse to erupt. When he kicks off at his two boys for their lack of ambition, his eyeballs stand out on stalks a good yard in advance. And yet, unlike Roy, he has a softer, sentimental side, recalling how he wrecked his stage career by playing it safe, for money.
He also shows great tenderness and charm around Clarkson as his beloved Mary, a woman who married beneath her station. She has the most interesting role, haunted by the loss of a child and her past playing piano for admiring nuns at school, and stilling her occasional rage with wry humour. Yet even she proves ever more numinous.
Most of Cox’s fury is focused on the boys. It is met by McCormack’s shifty-eyed older brother Jamie with a combination of deference, avoidance and deceit. Kynaston’s younger brother Edmund – the O’Neillish role of the tortured writer – holds his own with Cox, meeting his father’s quotation of Shakespeare with the bleaker poetry of Baudelaire. Thank God, therefore, for touches of Irish humour from Derry Girls’ Louisa Harland as a subversive maid.
Nothing wrong with the acting then, but still Jeremy Herrin’s morose production left me feeling buried alive in Lizzie Clachan’s dour, coffin-like set of undecorated boards and costumes of greyed-out greens and beige. It’s as though all four characters have given up hope before the show has even started. Sitting down to guzzle endless volumes of whisky, it’s all jaw-jaw as they dig ever deeper pits.
So, as a distant fog horn calls them into the night, and mist rolls in off the Atlantic Ocean ‘like the ghost of the sea’, this is a pretty good approximation to purgatory - and not an experience I can in good conscience recommend to anyone.
Tags:
Reprint:Friends are welcome to share on the Internet, but please indicate the source of the article when reprinting it.“Universal Unfoldings news portal”。http://botswana.gigirondeau.com/html-489f599505.html
Related articles
Arkansas teacher, 26, is charged with sexually assaulting 15
entertainmentA teacher and children's volunteer at one of Arkansas' biggest churches accused of sexually abusing ...
Read moreMan arrested after teen targeted, run over multiple times
entertainmentThe car that was seized by Waikato police in relation to an incident where a teenage boy was run ove ...
Read morePolice reach end of pay negotiations, new offer on table
entertainmentPhoto: ...
Read more
Popular articles
- At least 40 people die in Kenya after dam collapses
- US cautions after Hawaii neighbour Kiribati gets Chinese police
- PM Christopher Luxon defends David Seymour over TVNZ criticisms
- Weather: Cloudy, wet week expected for most
- 'Flying Apsaras' takes flight in Beijing, set for nationwide tour
- Princess of Wales in hospital, King Charles to get prostate treatment
Latest articles
Hamas official says no agreement with Israel if war continues in Gaza
Ruby Franke: Parenting advice YouTuber given maximum sentence for child abuse
Fox within sight of lead at US Masters midway point
Woman charged with murder after man found dead in Hamilton
UN Chinese Language Day celebrated in Tunisia
Call for schools soft drink ban renewed after government implements cellphone ban
LINKS
- Xi takes part in deliberation at annual national legislative session
- 9th Anniversary of the central route of South
- NPC reveals agenda legislators will deliberate
- Top court: Trump will stay on ballot in Colorado
- China successfully launched Tianmu
- Feature: Chinese
- Members of the national political advisory board arrive in Beijing for national session
- 9th Anniversary of the central route of South
- EU mulls boosting military spending, relying less on U.S.
- China's first domestic large cruise ship embarked on its maiden commercial voyage