Current location:health >>
Succession's Brian Cox stars in an American stage epic... but at three
health2633People 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.“Stellar Spectacle news portal”。http://dominicanrepublic.priasejati.net/content-42e599957.html
Related articles
200 days into Israel
healthChildren play at a camp in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, April 5, 2024. [Photo/Xinhua ...
【health】
Read moreWHO chief warns no functional hospital exists in north Gaza
health(Xinhua) 09:48, December 22, 2023An injured man is transferred to a hospital in central Gaza Strip c ...
【health】
Read moreDengue cases surpass 80,000 in Sri Lanka so far this year
health(Xinhua) 14:30, December 11, 2023COLOMBO, Dec. 10 (Xinhua) -- Total dengue cases reported in Sri Lan ...
【health】
Read more
Popular articles
- 50 migrants reported missing and 9 rescued after their boat overturns off Spanish Atlantic island
- Unmasking the reality behind US economic data
- U.S. halts freight railway crossings in western Texas to address influx of migrants
- Unmasking the reality behind US economic data
- Exodus at GB News continues: Pip Tomson becomes third star to quit in just three months
- Record Qingming holiday box office heats up for May Day moviegoing frenzy
Latest articles
Music and martial arts witness China
California braces for heavy rains, storms this week
U.S. California sees lowest home sales in 16 years
Lionel Messi scores fifth goal and has an assist in Inter Miami's 3
At least 15 killed in Israeli airstrikes on Rafah
U.S. CDC concerned about salmonella outbreak linked to cantaloupes
LINKS
- Chinese premier says China's market is always open to foreign businesses
- Experts reveal why 15 percent of people don't lose weight on Ozempic
- Leverkusen salvage Dortmund draw to stay unbeaten
- Chinese women's hockey team eye Paris 2024 medal
- Fallacies and facts about China's overcapacity
- China voices concern over Israel's continued airstrikes in Syria
- Urban festival brings Olympic athletes closer to audience
- The symbolism behind Meizhou's Mazu chignon headdress
- Buffalo Bill's seventh
- Sichuan beat Inner Mongolia to retain WCBA title