Ruth Leon recommends…. Long Day’s Journey Into Night – Laurie Metcalf and David Suchet
Ruth Leon recommendsLong Day’s Journey Into Night – Laurie Metcalf and David Suchet
This is an excellent transatlantic production of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night. This play, one of the greatest of all family dramas, is the most autobiographical of O’Neill’s plays.
The playwright’s father was James O’Neill, a famous actor who made his name playing the title character in a potboiler called The Count of Monte Christo, adapted from the novel by Alexandre Dumas, continually touring in it throughout the United States. O’Neill Senior drank heavily, always believing that, despite his huge popularity in this role, he had prostituted his talent by never playing more demanding parts.
O’Neill’s mother was, like her counterpart in Long Day’s Journey, a genteel morphine addict, thinly disguised as Mary Tyrone. Eugene was one of three sons (only two appear in the play). His older brother Jamie died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 45. O’Neill, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, was himself an alcoholic and a depressive, although his death at the age of 65 was unrelated to either illness.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night focuses on one day in the life of the Tyrone family. Youngest son Edmund is ill, and the family is worried about mother Mary’s ‘nerves’, never identified as addiction.
This critically acclaimed production was captured by Digital Theatre live at London’s Apollo Theatre. It was directed by Anthony Page and starred hugely popular British actor David Suchet as James Tyrone and the much admired American actor, Laurie Metcalfe, as his wife, Mary.
There’s also a film (very long to see in two or three parts) with Katharine Hepburn and the genius Jason Robards.
The Tyrones used to played as people in their fifties. Now they are played as people in their seventies.