The Daily Telegraph - Features
Cox is at his intemperate best in this taut family saga
Long Day’s Journey into Night Wyndham’s theatre
★★★★★
Though he played JS Bach briefly at the Theatre Royal Bath last autumn, it has been 10 years since Brian Cox trod the boards in London. In that time, of course, he has supercharged his fame thanks to Logan Roy, the brooding media mogul at the heart of the dynastic corporate saga Succession.
In what might almost be a calculated choice for fans, Eugene O’Neill’s 1941 autobiographical masterpiece – posthumously published in 1956 – sees Cox play one of the mightiest father figures in the 20th century American canon. James Tyrone is the ageing actor whose twilight years, circa 1912, are anything but tranquil; he’s confronted by a long-suffering, newly morphine-addled wife, Mary, and two grown-up sons, Jamie and Edmund, who have yet to find their place in the world.
As a domineering, intemperate patriarch who has tightly controlled the purse strings, the parallels with Succession are plain but so, too, are the points of divergence. Tyrone is a warmer character, aware of his fallibility; but whereas Cox’s forte on screen was forbidding impassivity, this verbose, confined epic calls for vocal clout and physical heft.
This he has. But in Jeremy Herrin’s straightforwardly unshowy production (which runs to three and a half hours), not even Cox’s declamatory poise can dispel a grinding sense of circular conversation and old-fashioned exposition. Daryl McCormack, as Jamie, and Laurie Kynaston, as Edmund, are restive, resentful counterpoints to his careworn kindliness and tested patience; but it’s hard to care about their gripes quite as much as they do.
Yet as more information slips out – about Edmund’s consumptive condition, a long-ago parental tragedy, and Mary’s furtive return to the morphine dependency they had hoped she had escaped – it’s as if the repetitive nature of the dialogue becomes a compulsive scratching at the deepest wounds, with pain oozing in all directions. Crucially, the terrific US actress Patricia Clarkson as the stricken matriarch generates an increasingly hypnotic force of unstable energy which each of the men, in their own way, must battle to work around.
Tilting between casual impulse and concerted intention, her bouts of dreamy withdrawal and swings from cruelty to kindness become a rolling statement of psychological distress. There’s something amusing about her tactless asides of regret and complaint – but in his plaintiveness and eloquent crestfallen sorrow, Cox, 77, registers the raw marital hurt.
The first-half has its flashes of sunlight; the second half details the walls infernally closing in. Those who know about Cox’s own tough upbringing will intuit how close to home all this may be for him but he is fully immersed in the role, conducting whisky-fuelled arias and fighting the phantoms of might-have-beens. As fog swirls like incense, and bells toll, Clarkson’s hauntingly ethereal Mary regresses into her vanished youth and lost hopes. Its a heartrending mirror of forsaken souls in which we may all glimpse our own familial griefs. Recommended.
Until June 8. Tickets: delfontmackintosh.co.uk
‘Those who know about Cox’s tough upbringing will intuit how close to home all this may be’