Like Logan Roy, Cox is a volcano waiting to erupt, but this morose production is close to purgatory
Was ever a play better titled? Eugene O’Neill’s 1941 autobiographical american drama, now starring Brian Cox as an actor- manager and patriarch of a dysfunctional family, is sometimes hailed as one of the greatest plays of the 20th century.
But at three-and-a half hours, it’s also an ultra-marathon of misery that can be mind-bogglingly exhausting.
Cox has cornered the market in dysfunctional dads after four TV seasons as the monstrous media mogul Logan Roy in succession.
Here though he goes down-market and back in time as James Tyrone, a miserly former actormanager in 1912, left with nothing in retirement but faded memories of former glories and the semi- comic conviction that his beloved shakespeare was a good Irish Catholic.
His wife Mary (Patricia Clarkson, from The station agent) is a wistful former convent girl who has become addicted to opium to treat her arthritis. and their two sons (Daryl McCormack, from Bad sister on apple TV+, and rising star Laurie Kynaston) are dipsomaniac drifters – one with a taste for prostitutes, the other suffering from tuberculosis.
Now 77, Cox remains a force to be reckoned with in a character meant to be 65. Not unlike Logan Roy, he is a roving volcano looking for an excuse to erupt. When he kicks off at his two boys for their lack of ambition, his eyeballs stand out on stalks. and yet, unlike Roy, he has a softer, sentimental side, recalling how he wrecked his stage career by playing it safe, for money.
He also shows great tenderness and charm around Ms Clarkson as his beloved Mary, a woman who married beneath her station. she has the most interesting role, haunted by the loss of a child and her past playing piano for admiring nuns at school, and stilling her occasional rage with wry humour.
Most of Cox’s fury is focused on the boys. It’s met by McCormack’s shifty- eyed older brother Jamie with a combination of deference, avoidance and deceit.
Kynaston’s younger brother Edmund – the O’Neillish role of the tortured writer – holds his own with Cox, meeting his father’s quotation of shakespeare with the bleaker poetry of Baudelaire. Thank God, therefore, for touches of Irish humour from Derry Girls’ Louisa Harland as a subversive maid. Nothing wrong with the acting then, but still Jeremy Herrin’s morose production lacks even a flicker of hope. It left me feeling buried alive in Lizzie Clachan’s dour, coffin-like set of undecorated boards and costumes of greyed- out greens and beige. It’s as though all four characters have given up hope before the show has even started. sitting down to guzzle bottomless volumes of whisky, it’s just endless rounds of jaw-jaw as they dig ever deeper pits.
so, as a distant foghorn calls them into the night, and mist rolls in off the atlantic Ocean ‘like the ghost of the sea’, the show proves to be a pretty good approximation of purgatory – and that’s really not an experience I can in good conscience recommend to anyone.