Theater Review: Mixed results from a British Long Day's Journey into Night at BAM

A Long Day’s Journey into Night

By Eugene O’Neill

Directed by Sir Richard Eyre

Starring Lesley Manville, Jeremy Irons, and Matthew Beard

Brooklyn Academy of Music

May 20, 2018

This performance of O’Neill’s last play puts a cap on my one-year Eugene O’Neill marathon, beginning with the early expressionist plays The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones, then the experimental, stream-of-consciousness Strange Interlude, the neoclassically tragedy Mourning Becomes Elektra, and finally his move into realism with The Iceman Cometh and A Long Day’s Journey into Night. What is fascinating about all of these is that none is a great play in a traditional sense. They are all too long, too odd, too discursive, or too unfocused to rise to, say Death of a Salesman’s level. (Well, maybe Iceman…stay tuned for an update at the end of this review). None is particularly entertaining. But they are all profound explorations of who we are in the world, all are written with poetic, elevated language, and all left me thinking and reflecting for days afterwards. So O’Neill writes great plays, without caring much about the stagecraft that defines great playwriting.

A Long Day’s Journey into Night is a good example. It was written in 1942, but only first performed in 1957. O’Neill apparently did not intend it for stage performance. Yet most critics regard it as his finest play, despite its often 4+ hour running time and uneven pacing. In it, we watch the dysfunction of the Tyrone family, dominated by the often-sleeping mother Mary, addicted to painkillers. In many ways it is a clinical depiction of a codependent addicted family, not able to function while still enabling the mother. One son, the poetic Edmund (O’Neill’s alter-ego) is sick with tuberculosis and squanders his life. The more extrovert James, Jr.  wants to be a playwright like his father James (played subtly by Jeremy Irons) but cannot get beyond bars and brothels (his pipedreams of writing success echo the drunks in The Iceman Cometh). The play is asymmetric. The first act defines the family relationships and is dominated by Mary, who tries to passively-aggressively control everyone, and says truly awful things to everyone. In Act 2, she goes into a morphine haze and disappears for most of the act, only reappearing for an ending mini-monologue. I think O’Neill here was trying to show how a toxic family member can dominate even while absent. Most productions move languorously, duplicating Mary’s opioid fantasy-existence. Perhaps this is why O’Neill did not want it performed--his concept on the page might not make for a good live play.

This production by Sir Richard Eyre took a different tack. The Mary of actress Lesley Manville was not hazy and foggy, but hyperkinetic, ruthless, and cutting, but all with a victim’s whininess and a fake-maternal concern. This made for a fast-moving, intense, and exciting first half. Her dynamics vs. the more introverted James and Edmund (played with gawky, awkward physicality by an excellent Matthew Beard) and the drunken son James, Jr. were riveting, and brought out each character’s core qualities. It was like watching a real, manipulative argument between people you care about: painful, even excruciating. I was out of breath at intermission.

The second act was markedly different, and less successful. When Mary disappears for her long, addicted nap, the series of scenes pairing the other characters lost focus. Each actor became more idiosyncratic, especially the two sons. A hostile, accusatory speech by James Jr. to his father late in the act is often an emotional high point of the play, as all the repressed venom emerges. Here, Rory Keenan’s bellowing and ranting made it seem more like an odd attempt at drunkenly tragic humor, and left a gaping hole in the drama. Irons and Beard were better but could never quite carry forward the drama without mother there. When Mary finally returned, it seemed oddly anticlimactic. She is clutching her wedding dress, and seems to have regressed to her childhood, completely having lost touch with reality (another mad scene, connecting this to romantic tragic characters like Ophelia, Giselle and Lucia di Lammermoor). But Eyer’s pacing of the second act did not make this the horrific climax that O’Neill intended, but as an odd afterthought. What resulted was half of a great play. Based on Act 1 this director is obviously capable of gripping, outstanding interpretation, but things went aground in the second act.  I liked the set…all receding angles and lines with a focal point high offstage left—where mother goes to shoot up in her room.I was very appreciative to see the talented Ms. Manville perform, though, and would love to see her tackle the other great roles of twentieth century drama. She is mostly known for British TV and stage, but did appear in the recent Paul Thomas Anderson film Phantom Thread. She is very worth seeking out. I think I will need to see this play again in a more conventional production before judging it too harshly.

Update: I saw Denzel Washington in an early April preview of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh and enjoyed it, but wondered how it would evolve. I saw it again on May 30, and it was even better. The ensemble was tighter, the jokes better timed. Colm Meaney and David Morse were even more subtle, more tragic, and more doomed. A last-act gimmick where the suicidal Don Parit (Austin Butler) watched the proceeding already perched on a fire escape (from which he will later jump) was jettisoned, and his intense stage presence joined the others in watching the epic ending monologue by Hickey (Denzel Washington). This was even more raw and well timed. The small changes made for an exceptional, quickly moving 3 1/2 hours. It made me see this play as O’Neill’s greatest, and his ultimate statement on man’s self deception and futility.