LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

★★★ Wyndham’s Theatre until June 8 wyndhamstheatre.co.uk

Succession’s Brian Cox tackles another flawed patriarch in Eugene O’neill’s unflinchingly raw autobiographical masterpiece which uses his family’s real first names except his own.

Cox plays O’neill’s bitter, blustering actor fatherjames, transmuting pain into pathos along with “dope fiend” mother Mary, alcoholic older brother Jamie and tuberculosis-struck aspiring writer ‘Edmund’ (Eugene) across a single day at their at their coastline Connecticut cottage.

Cox is decent but takes a while to warm up. Patricia Clarkson exquisitely flickers between playful, melancholy and vicious, increasingly piteous as she retreats from reality. Laurie Kynaston and Daryl Mccormack impress as siblings trapped in the sins of their parents and Louisa Harland blazes all too briefly as the maid.

Like the sea outside, the repetitive waves of phrases and circular swirl of constant confrontation and conciliation are central to a pitiless portrait of a family who loves even as they destroy each other.

But Jeremy Herrin’s muted production too often lulls where it might surge. Amid tasteful wisps of fog and faint soundscapes, Lizzie Clachlan’s sparse set seeks the bleakness of a house that was never a home, but is rather too Scandichic to convince. It’s all a bit mannered, never piercing the eviscerating majesty of a play that reduced O’neill to bitter tears each day as he wrote it. Yet in those words, his genius still shines, right through to Mary’s unbearable final line.

THE 39 STEPS ★★★ UK Tour until August 3 love39steps.com

Jolly japes and silly voices abound in Patrick Barlow’s 2005 spiffing spoof of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 interwar thriller, with four actors playing 139 parts.

Following the original plot about foiling dastardly foreign spies, Tom Byrne’s hapless Richard Hannay tangles with Safeena Ladha’s three femmes of varying fatality. Eugene Mccoy and Maddie Rice madly romp through rapid character, accent, gender and hat changes, while splendidly slapdash staging creates bridges from stepladders and everyone flaps their clothes when it’s windy.

Laughs flow but not every joke lands and the interval saps momentum from the breezy 100-minute runtime. But the game cast are a hoot.