Long Day’s Journey Into Night assessment: Brian Cox’s tyrannical Tyrone is a masterclass in impotent rage

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God, this is a depressing play. For three and a half hours, the 4 members of the Tyrone household – a morphine addict, two alcoholics and a consumptive – shout and mope and recriminate, and director Jeremy Herrin actually leans into the distress in his bleak, spare manufacturing of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece.

So why would anybody wish to sit by way of 210 minutes of such sustained despair? Well, first there’s the appearing. It’s a type of performs that wants a mighty pair in the lead roles of James and Mary Tyrone, he a once-famous actor who is now a whiskey-guzzling miser, she a bitter morphine addict. Lesley Manville and Jeremy Irons have carried out it, so have Charles Dance and Jessica Lange. This time it’s over to American film star Patricia Clarkson and the beast that is Brian Cox as James, with Cox reminding us all, after the success of Succession, that the stage is his outdated stomping floor – and it’s the place he stomps finest.

There’s additionally the truth that, 85 years after it was written, Long Day’s Journey stays an extremely astute account of habit and of the influence it has on a household. “I’ve become such a liar,” says Mary. “I never lied about anything once upon a time. Now I have to lie, especially to myself. One day, long ago, I found I could no longer call my soul my own.”

It’s such a massive machine of a play that it takes a whereas for the wheels to begin transferring, however as soon as the preliminary creaks and jerks are out of the best way, it’s an unrelenting plummet. It’s all there in the desolation of Lizzie Clachan’s set, three recessing rooms that get gloomier the additional again you go. The few bits of furnishings are all scrubbed to reveal pale wooden, the partitions a washed-out gray, the lighting more and more weak and white. With so little there, the manufacturing turns into a form of specimen field, the Tyrone household like creatures beneath a microscope – and we watch them drive themselves to despair. Herrin turns this into a showcase for Big Acting, with no distractions.

Cox makes Tyrone a tyrant, barking and roaring, flaring into rage on the slightest provocation, simmering down simply as shortly, and all of the whereas his household don’t pay him the slightest little bit of discover. He rages, Lear-like, impotent, and simply as shortly turns into a tender husband, staring with deep love into his spouse’s eyes.

Clarkson, in the meantime, has a unprecedented capability to flitter in and out of actuality, typically simply together with her eyes. One second they’re piercing into the individual she’s speaking to, absolutely lucid; the following they’re staring blankly as she loses herself in her recollections. With simply a faint smile, she turns into nearly diaphanous, a drifting, spectral presence on stage. You can’t maintain your eyes off these two.

Laurie Kynaston and Daryl McCormack tackle the roles of the sons, Edmund and Jamie – one a morbid poet, the opposite a self-loathing alcoholic actor. The manner they draw on threads of their dad and mom is intelligent: Kynaston’s Edmund has a number of the swagger of his dad, whereas McCormack’s Jamie has the identical inwardness as his mum. Meanwhile, Louisa Harland (Orla from Derry Girls) does brilliantly because the Irish maid Cathleen, tuning down a number of the parts that may make her character a comedian stereotype.

By no means is this a excellent manufacturing. The stripped-back strategy is actually exposing, and there are moments when it doesn’t bear as much as the scrutiny, particularly in the whiskey-heavy later scenes. You miss the heft, too, when neither Cox nor Clarkson is on stage – much less a criticism of the sons than a testomony to the hypnotic talent of the dad and mom – and a few scenes in the second half really feel bum-numbingly lengthy. And it’s not precisely an pleasurable evening out on the theatre, both. What it is, although, is very spectacular, usually mesmerising, and – when it hits proper – profoundly transferring.

Wyndham’s, till 8 June