Long Day’s Journey into Night, Wyndham’s Theatre review ★★★★★

Eugene O'Neill’s autobiographical family drama might have been written circa 1940 – and its references to automobiles and the wasting disease consumption certainly root it in the early 1900s – but a revival has never felt more timely. The Tyrone family’s suffering at the hands of Mary’s morphine addiction echoes North America’s opioid epidemic, while its portrait of a unit in which two adult sons still live at home, unable to catch a break professionally, mirrors how many families are living here in Britain amid the ongoing cost of living crisis. Context aside, Jeremy Herrin’s unhurried production is nuanced, exposing and ultimately devastating. Its driving force? An imposing but frail, boastful but bruised Brian Cox (Succession) as family patriarch James Tyrone.

Despite their addictions (beyond Mary’s doping, the men knock back whisky like it’s water) and resentments, the Tyrones are desperate to uphold an image of happy family life. It opens with Cox’s James and Patricia Clarkson’s Mary smugly kissing as they affirm their gratitude for one another and fret over who’s eaten enough for breakfast. But it’s a thin plate of glass: James’s volcanic mood swings cause the first cracks, and over the next three-and-a-bit hours, the fragile pretence shatters into shards as the four blame one another for their unfulfilled dreams and personal ruin.

Brian Cox, Patricia Clarkson, Laurie Kynaston and Daryl McCormack in Long Day's Journey into Night. Credit: Johan Persson

Mary’s insistence the family’s summer house isn’t a proper home is realised in Lizzie Clachan’s set, where one undecorated cabin room appears to lead into another that’s equally sparse, and another. There’s not much visual stimulation here – only whisky bottles get added to the table – but there needn’t be: we’re hanging on every word.

It’s a mammoth text that challenges each family member to wade through poignant, wordy monologues, but it’s Cox’s James who bears the brunt. He’s transfixing, swinging between moments of bravado, boasting about the Shakespearean actor he could have become, and rocking meditatively in a chair, haunted and mourning the living ghost of his wife as she denounces their 36 years together. It’s a gut-wrenching, stunning performance.

Opposite him, Clarkson channels Mary’s manic energy into distant stares and inappropriately timed laughs. Daryl McCormack (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande) holds the tension as sarcastic, sneering, volatile son Jamie, and Laurie Kynaston (Spring Awakening) is excellent as his softly spoken, effeminate brother Edmund, the morbid poet. Providing much needed light relief is Louisa Harland’s maid Cathleen, tightly funny – show-stealing, even – in all her scenes.

It’s a story that unfolds over the course of a single day and in Herrin’s production, becomes increasingly uncomfortable to watch – as it should. By nighttime, it leaves you itching to break free from this unhappy brood and their denial, finger-pointing and simmering contempt. It’s a musing on lifelong regrets and disappointments, loneliness in company, and a fatal preoccupation with fixing appearances over treating problems at their root cause.

Tickets for Long Day’s Journey into Night are on sale here.