Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Although it may seem a bit on the nose for Brian Cox to make his long-awaited stage return playing the ailing patriarch of an American family, this is absolutely not ‘Succession’. Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ is at the very least a strong contender for the greatest American play of all time, a three-hour-plus semi-autobiographical epic that O’Neill refused to share publicly in his own lifetime, and won him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1957. It concerns the Tyrell family, headed by father James, an actor who achieved success by squandering his talent and playing a single commercially successful role repeatedly for most of his life (as O’Neill’s own father did with a production of ‘The Count of Monet Cristo’). The story follows the family’s implosion over the course of a single day, as long-held resentments emerge between James (Cox), his addled wife Mary (award-winning US actor Patricia Clarkson) and their embittered sons Edmund (Laurie Kynaston) and James Jr (Daryl McCormack), with Louisa Harland rounding out the cast as their maid Cathleen. Jeremy Herrin directs what may or may not prove Cox’s stage swansong, but should in any case be a monumental night at the theatre.