Raw power and star quality of ‘the saddest play ever written’

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

Wyndham’s, WC2 EUGENE O’NEILL’S piercingly autobiographical vision of a family bent on self-destruction is a play that appeals to great actors. Here it gets a suitably magnetic revival, starring Lesley Manville, currently up for an Oscar for her rivetingly frosty performance in Phantom Thread, and Jeremy Irons, back on the London stage for the first time in a decade.

Irons is James Tyrone, a former matinee idol galled by the knowledge that he wasted his talent on mediocre work. Irons relishes the actorly excesses of Tyrone — and mixes his cigar-chomping dynamism with scowling attentiveness and a wintry disappointment.

Manville plays his wife Mary, talkative and restless, fluttering around the stage like a white moth, and repeatedly touching her hair (an intricate silver wig) in order to regain composure. She is wounded by her husband’s tight-fistedness and by guilty memories that seem more immediate than the present. Manville’s interpretation is finely detailed and compassionate.

One of the couple’s sons, Jamie, is a self-loathing failure, given a booze-sodden rowdiness by Rory Keenan. The other, Matthew Beard’s Edmund, is almost concave, as if hollowed out by his twin afflictions — tuberculosis and an obsession with morbid poetry — though Mary manages to convince herself that he’s simply picked up a “summer cold”. As these four desperate figures peck at one another with increasing violence, they behave in wildly contradictory ways, fuelled by addiction to three things — drink, drugs and nostalgia. The sense that they’re at sea is heightened by the repeated mournful sound of a foghorn and by the strange perspectives of Rob Howell’s design — a book-lined room that’s also a fragile, translucent vessel.

In Richard Eyre’s production, first seen nearly two years ago at Bristol Old Vic, this sprawling drama feels pacier than usual, though it still weighs in at three and a half hours. It remains a gruelling experience — Eyre calls it “the saddest play ever written” — but has a naked emotional power that’s genuinely absorbing.

Until April 7 (0844 482 5120, longdaystheplay.com)