Brian Cox heading a family at war... again!
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Wyndham’s Theatre, London
The Divine Mrs S
Hampstead Theatre, London Until April 27, 2hrs 20mins
Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the mother of all family-row plays. Every box set and modern broken-family drama owes it a debt. That includes Succession, whose star, Brian Cox, a limber 77, now returns to the West End stage in this American classic set on one day in 1912.
Eugene O’Neill’s family-at-war play comes with awesome levels of boozing. If you matched this drama drink for drink, you’d be in a coma before the interval.
Cox plays James Tyrone, a has-been actor, a miser – he unscrews light bulbs to save his electric bill – a bully and an alcoholic.
Both his sons have crawled inside a bottle of whisky to escape his withering tongue. Then there’s his poor wife,
Mary, convent-educated and charming but a hopeless dope addict. Medicinal morphine has helped dull the pain of years being hitched to the world’s stingiest touring actor.
There’s not a dud part in the play. The sons are terrific: Daryl McCormack exerts a futile charm as the whoring barfly son Jamie (a part that was memorably played by the unknown Kevin Spacey in the 1980s, when Jack Lemmon played Tyrone in London) and Laurie Kynaston is the sweet, tubercular Edmund, a coughing poet.
Cox – not quite on top of his lines on opening night – is at his best when he’s all crestfallen and on the verge of making up with these boys before a new blast of invective ruins it. For sheer presence, he is matched by screen star Patricia Clarkson, beautiful as the away-with-thefairies Mary, her mind lost in a mist of sorrows, always aching for her next fix.
Louisa Harland (Derry Girls and Renegade Nell) as the sly Irish maid provides some much-needed laughs.
I could have done with a less bleak design – it’s all bare boards, and the sound of foghorns booming becomes its own lament for this ruined family.
But it would be wrong not to issue a customer warning. The evening is long, wordy and the second half is gruelling. At times I wanted to sneak out and massage my poor bottom.
It doesn’t help that it’s directed by Jeremy Herrin with a hint of slavishness. But what an impressive great beast this play is, ripped from the gut of a writer who based Tyrone on his own ghastly father.
Watching these fine actors bring to life a family wrecked by addiction, their love for one another corroded by hatred, is sad but also weirdly uplifting. One’s own family issues don’t seem so bad after watching this lot.
The Divine Mrs S is about the actress Sarah Siddons (1755-1831). ‘Mrs Siddons’ was a great star of her day but there is still no biography of her, so this new backstage comedy is very welcome.
She is played with terrific vim by Rachael Stirling, in what at times seems like a Georgian version of Noises Off.
Siddons’ deep talent – we get a hint of her famous Lady Macbeth – is offset by her controlling brother, John
Philip Kemble, a shouting ham actor played by Dominic Rowan with Ernie Wise levels of pretentiousness.
Then there’s an oily critic (Gareth Snook), Patti, a Barnsley girl who becomes Mrs S’s confidante (played by Anushka Chakravarti), and Eva Feiler as a young playwright called Baillie, who has to conceal her identity as a woman.
April De Angelis’s comedy has a wide feminist angle – the theatre is, after all, still a man’s world. But it’s an evening generously laden with jokes.
Even if you find these jokes over the top (though I didn’t), in Rachael Stirling’s genuinely moving portrait of the actress and survivor it’s a pleasure to meet the remarkable Mrs S.