For five years, Eugene O’Neill’s early work has taken precedence over his later accepted classics in this country. It’s as if, by staging his final play A Moon for the Misbegotten in 2006, the Old Vic reset the cycle. Since then, there have been major productions of his first success, The Emperor Jones, earlier full-length plays like Anna Christie and Beyond the Horizon, as well as a trawl through his inceptive sea-set shorts, but – as far as I can tell - nothing written after 1924.
These are all powerful pieces of drama, such is the skill of a playwright often dubbed America’s Shakespeare. However, towards the end of his career, O’Neill’s arsenal went nuclear, particular when he began to power them with a core of angry autobiography. Long Day’s Journey into Night – his third-last, finished in 1945 – is a juggernaut of a play. It makes his earlier works look like park lake pedalos.
The Tyrone family are the O’Neills by another surname and they smell just as sour. Like the playwright’s own father, James Tyrone (David Suchet) is a brilliant actor, stuck in the commercial quicksands of The Count of Monte Christo. Laurie Metcalf’s Mary, his wife, has just slipped back into the morphine addiction that has plagued her since difficulties during the birth of her newly tuberculitic youngest son Edmund (Kyle Soller). Their eldest, James Jnr (Trevor White), is an ill-disciplined mess of a failed actor, prone to booze and broads.
The collapse of the Tyrone family, like a detonated tower, is awful both in its suddenness and its scale. Between breakfast and bedtime, they suffer an implosion that leaves nothing standing. Yet O’Neill never once relies on an extraneous event to achieve this. The meltdown is inevitable; their self-combustion is inbuilt or pre-programmed; an inescapable fate. It happens after years of corrosive routine. Long Day’s Journey into Night shows the day the dam bursts.
O’Neill’s play is incredible because it works exquisitely in both directions. Watch to see what happens next and the sheer force of momentum is overpowering. Work backwards, playing detective, and it’s arguably even more rewarding. O’Neill has carefully linked together such a careful chain that the root causes of root causes become visible. Anthony Page’s outstanding production possesses absolute psychological – and political – clarity.
As a surface skewering of the American dream, Long Day Journey into Night is just as swiftly ruthless as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the set-text on the subject. James Tyrone’s endless expansionism, ploughing his money into new (dodgy) real estate, is the reason for his extreme thriftiness. He’d rather squint in the light of a single bulb, than read clearly, and Suchet sends his glance straight to the level of the whisky bottle on every entrance.
Metcalf, meanwhile, catches sneaky glimpses of herself in the mirror, as Mary attempts to keep her visible symptoms in check. Soller does the same with Edmund’s handkerchief after each corrosive cough, ensuring any specks of blood stay secret.
It is at this personal level that O’Neill’s play has its real potency. It is a vicious chain reaction. One character’s best intentions enflame another’s greatest concern. The Tyrones ruin one other. They can’t help it.
“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.” – Mary Tyrone
Suchet makes you realise the strength of James’s love for his wife. Brusque with his sons, he softens with her, either to joke or to nurse. It is for her sake and security that he’s careful with his money, blind to the actual effects of his actions. “I’ve never felt it was my home,” she says, “Your father would never spend the money to make it right.” Likewise, the more Edmund worries for his mother and her morphine use, the more she worries back and, so, returns to the drug she took up after his birth and for which he’s blamed to the point of breakdown. They drag each other down.
Most of all, though, James is entirely self-made. He started with nothing and provided his children with the opportunity not to have to follow suit. Yet, that also strips his sons of the opportunity to earn his respect. He sees them, like his property portfolio and his whisky (which remains the same level, but weakens over the course of the play), as assets – products of and testimony to his own achievements – rather than people in their own right. Their failures are his shame and the shadow of that shame only furthers their failures. His ultimate flaw is the belief, gained from his own upwards life journey, that the individual is responsible for his or own fate, for better or worse. He is capable of empathy, but never sympathy. He is blind to his own weakness, namely financial ambition, because the culture to which he subscribes (capitalism) decress it a virtue. The tragedy, therefore, is that he can no more change his nature than Edmund can alter the fact of his birth.
Nonetheless, James ruins his family with his meddling, removing their agency by employing his own. Suchet’s James is a puppeteer. He orchestrates his family with glee. “Maybe if you asked your mother now what you said you were going to –“ he says to Edmund, before an almost comically hasty exit, “By God, look at the time.” In the final act, he confesses to his youngest son that he regrets his career path to easy riches over difficult roles. (How many of us can say otherwise?) Not only does Suchet let you glimpse the glisten of potential – if rusty – greatness, he manages to find echoes of both Prospero and Faust in there. In his moss-green dressing gown, he could pass for either.
Then there’s Metcalf, who perhaps overdoes the physical symptoms of Mary’s morphine habit by wheeling and ticking about the stage, but handles the text extraordinarily. She skims over and whizzes through the obvious passages, where O’Neill is a tad too direct, and instead indulgences the trivialities, hovering on inconsequential phrases as if distracted by a secondary thought. Soller is both physically and emotional concave as Edmund, as hollowed by the years of blame as by his illnes. He manages to express a felt fear of death alongside an intellectual dismissal of such fears. White catches the right note of self-loathing in James Jnr’s reproaching bitterness.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night needs nothing but a straight bat. It thrives in the detailed playing and Page’s production offers more than enough to justify the play’s greatness. Possibly more than any play I’ve seen before, I left the theatre with a far greater understanding of how human beings function and how they self-destruct.
Photograph: Johan Persson
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