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THE ROYAL NATIONAL THEATRE
LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
By Eugene O'NeillDirected by Howard Davies
Decor by John Gunter
Lighting by Mark Henderson
Music by Dominic Muldowney
Piano by Steven Edis
Sound by John Leonard/Christopher Johns
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A reminder that Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night is now in the National Theatre's repertory at the Lyttleton. Howard Davies's production contains a rock-like but subtle performance by Timothy West as James Tyrone - not a histrionic domestic tyrant but an ordinary man: simple, mean, wounded and lost. Prunella Scales partners him as a spiky, difficult Mary, in whom resentful gentility has taken over from kindliness. This is a harrowing duet precisely because the two actors refuse to be grand.
This is the National's second coproduction with the Bristol Old Vic; but as the Arts Council and the local funding bodies squabble over how one of Britain's most prestigious reps should be funded, one wonders if there will ever be another.
When they look back on the history of the British theatre in the 1980s, they will see that one of its central achievements was in fact an American one, the establishment of Arthur Miller as the greatest living dramatist.
Before that, asked on this side of the Atlantic for the greatest work of American theater, critics and audiences alike would probably have settled (and there are those who will still) for Eugene O'neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night", which Howard Davies now bravely brings back to the National Theatre not quite 20 years after Olivier and Michael Blakemore made it that company's strongest critical success to date.
This in essence is the touring version, not simply because it began as a co-production with the imperiled Bristol Old Vic but also because its stars, Timothy West and Prunella Scales, move it down the scale from the epic to the distinctly suburban. Yet there is no betrayal here. It is indeed arguable that the aging actor-manager who was O'Neill's father and is the twin focus of his son's epic tragedy, was in reality an actor far more akin in style and career to West than Olivier, whose problem was always to restrain himself to essential adequacy rather than superhuman starriness.
The claim to greatness of "Long Day's Journey" - written, as its author said, "in tears and blood" - lies in its painful revelation of O'Neill's own family life, and what must move us most is the cost to the dramatist of the material he has chosen to haul down from parental attic.
Here then are the O'Neills, all too thinly disguised as the Tyrones: James, the aged, skinfling actor; Mary, the mother, hopelessly addicted to narcotics, and Jamie, the elder brother, an alcoholic intent only on seeing that Edmund/Eugene should not succeed where he himself had already failed.
In writing their story for the stage, O'Neill thought he could force the exorcism to work, that he could at last face up to his own dead relatives by first dissecting them and reconstructing them "with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness." But his ban on performance of the play in his lifetime (and therefore for a quarter of a century) suggests that his feelings were not as mellow as all that. The residue of bitter despair that O'Neill felt for himself and his kin moves the play along like an emotional tidal wave across almost four hours, sweeping its characters before it until they finally drown in their sorrows and a lethal mix of drink and drugs.
As the spotlight shifts inexorably from one to the other, we are gradually made aware that their life together can only continue on a slippery surface of self-pity and self-delusion. In that sense this is a play that gets us from Strindberg's "Dance of Death" to Albee's "Virginia Woolf." and we are left, in the end, with four characters in desperate search of the family they are supposed to constitute.
The Wests remain as a husband-and-wife couple resolutely low-key, rather as if "Macbeth" were to star the Macduffs. But Scales does achieve moments of heartbreaking withdrawal, while this is the only "Journey" I've seen to emphasize the two sons (the Irish actors Sean McGinley and Stephen Dillane), who fill the parental void with raw performances of superlative theatricality.
Telescoped into a single day, Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical account of his diagnosis as a consumptive was too painful to write until almost 30 years after the event. Exposed like squirming specimens in John Gunter's glass-walled summer house, the four members of the Tyrone family pick at barely-healing scabs then seek narcotic refuge from the realities thus exposed. Prunella Scales gives a brittle study of bitter recrimination, pulled up short by the genteel good manners of her youth and tempered by girlish appeals, until she sinks into a morphine-induced torpor. Timothy West's quick-tempered patriarch lacks - or perhaps has long abandoned - the romantic aura of an ageing matinee idol, but is powerful in his self-righteous conviction. Young Edmund (sensitively played by Stephen Dillane) faces up to the reality of a "summer cold" which proves to be tubercular, and to the weaknesses with which his family is riddled. Howard Davies's controlled production captures the isolation of this tormented household, pacing out again and again the familiar steps of its dance of denial.
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