The bowwow bravado that made Brian Cox the compelling linchpin of HBO’s Succession has been imported to London’s West End. Cox is currently inhabiting James Tyrone, the dyspeptic, popular Irish actor and paterfamilias in Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night (written in 1941 and first produced in 1956). Cox is, to put it mildly, a hot ticket.
As rough and sturdy as a tree stump, with broad shoulders, a deep chest, and a large, finely shaped head, Cox is some sort of proletarian dynamo who seems physically punch-pressed out of O’Neill’s stage directions: “The stamp of his profession is unmistakably on him.... The actor shows in all his unconscious habits of speech, movement, and gesture.” Here, Cox is not speaking as the spendthrift kingpin of a media empire but as the penny-pinching, self-made, Celtic player who has traded his chance for greatness for the comfort of boulevard paydays, touring in The Count of Monte Cristo.
“I’d lost the great talent I once had through years of easy repetition, never learning a new part, never really working hard,” Tyrone confesses to his morose, tuberculosis-stricken second son, Edmund (Laurie Kynaston). Tyrone is a sort of overbearing tin-pot king of all he surveys, which, in 1912, consists of a modest, waterfront summer house in Connecticut and some local real-estate speculations.
He rules his neurotic roost with a firm hand and a hot head. He can be lacerating. To his oldest, feckless son, Jamie (Daryl McCormack), also an actor, he snaps, “If you weren’t my son, there isn’t a manager in the business who would give you a part, your reputation stinks so.” Tyrone prefers the headbutt to the slapped wrist. “Keep your damned Socialist, anarchist sentiments out of my affairs,” he explodes at Edmund.
The production has the extra expert vigorish of Patricia Clarkson, who plays Tyrone’s tender and tormented wife, Mary, slipping back inexorably into morphine addiction over the course of a punishing 24 hours of family strife. Her quiet, heartrending unraveling counterpoints Tyrone’s noisy control. Cox’s roaring, which he does sensationally, keeps the Tyrone family at arm’s length and also has the strange effect of placing the audience at a distance. His bombast veers toward one-note; it tilts the emotional valence of the subtle interactions of this fine play.
He rules his neurotic roost with a firm hand and a hot head.
On opening night, Cox hadn’t yet found those nuanced moments with which to let the audience in on Tyrone’s own agonizing struggle to fend off the living death of the resignation that finally claims him. The lack of this emotional filigree by no means spoils his performance but just mutes its wallop.
“One day long ago I found I could no longer call my soul my own,” Mary says, in her litany of regrets. All the characters, one way or another, are lost souls, ghosts of their best selves. For O’Neill’s dance of death, the director, Jeremy Herrin, and Lizzie Clachan, the set designer, have more or less cleared all the furniture from the Tyrone house—no books, no comfortable chairs, no sense of a life lived, no windows—allowing the emblematic fog to surround them as night falls.
“We’re just concentrating on the space and the light and a simple use of plain furniture and props that don’t impede on the audience’s essence of the play,” Herrin is quoted in the program. In this low-budget arrangement, the Tyrone family’s merry-go-round of suffering is acted out in a minimalist room, which makes it seem like they’re trapped in some kind of walnut-paneled sauna. The effect is unmooring. O’Neill’s lost souls are left to float in basically neutral space, satellites revolving around each other but never able to connect, sealed off in their little caves of consciousness. “I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death,” Edmund confesses to his father during their night watch of Mary.
One of the achievements of the play is to demonstrate how O’Neill’s internal emptiness was forged by the absence of his parents. With his mother turned inward and unavailable, on drugs, and his father turned outward, in his peripatetic career, as a child Edmund was never really seen. Mary laments the lack of a home and puts it down to the lifestyle of a touring player. “He lived too much in hotels…. He doesn’t understand a home. He doesn’t feel at home in it. And yet, he wants a home,” Mary says, unable, in her charming, passive-aggressive way, to see that she couldn’t provide a safe, containing emotional environment for her youngest son—for whom she has been both overprotective and under-involved. “She’ll listen, but she won’t listen. She’ll be here, and she won’t be here,” Jamie explains to Edmund.
The play begins with fog as a fact of the external landscape, and by the end—even in this production, where the fog machine seems turned to low—it’s a metaphor for the internal one, the outward and visible manifestation of denial, a refusal to see or to suffer. “It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find you or touch you anymore,” says Mary, for whom morphine provides the same kind of experience.
Edmund also admits, “The fog is where I wanted to be.” In fact, in one way or another, all the family is metaphorically fog-bound, each cut off from the world, each with their own method of escaping a grief they feel but can’t altogether understand: for Tyrone, it’s drinking; for Jamie, it’s sex and cynicism, disabusing himself of all value; and for Edmund, who has “the makings of a poet,” according to his father, it’s writing, which, O’Neill said, “serves as a coat of armor” and “a vacation from living.”
“He doesn’t understand a home. He doesn’t feel at home in it. And yet, he wants a home.”
O’Neill, as the scholar and literary critic George Steiner observed, “was committed in a somber, rather moving way, to bad writing.” In Long Day’s Journey into Night, he fesses up to this limitation. Edmund admits to his father that he has only the “makings of a poet…. Stammering is the best I’ll ever do…. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.” The play, written to reveal O’Neill to himself and never to be performed in his lifetime, is some kind of freak of his imagination. It is not merely O’Neill’s best story, it is, really, his only story. With no aspirations for fame—only for authenticity—there is none of O’Neill’s swaggering gravity, his “cultural gas.” The play forces nothing and achieves everything. His writing is direct, unpretentious, poetic.
In the last moments, as the men doze drunkenly in their living-room chairs waiting for Mary’s upstairs pacing to stop, a sudden flickering of the lights and the sounds of a Chopin waltz from the back room—“as if an awkward schoolgirl practicing it for the first time”—announce Mary’s phantom-like entrance. Wraithlike and carrying her wedding dress, her chignon unloosed so her hair hangs girlishly down to the middle of her negligee, Mary moves absentmindedly and unseeing around the room. She is in her own drugged world, beyond desire or humiliation. She is, quite literally, the ghost of her former childhood self.
Her poleaxed family looks on in horror. It’s a big moment—one of the best-known monologues in American drama—and Clarkson finesses it with knowing tact, magnifying the tragedy of her retreat. She becomes the sweet, credulous, hopeful teenager standing in front of Mother Elizabeth and announcing her fervent desire to become a nun. “She said, if I was so sure, that I must prove it wasn’t simply my imagination. She said, if I was so sure, then I wouldn’t mind putting myself to the test by going home after I graduated, and living as other girls lived, going out to parties and dances and enjoying myself; and then if after a year or two I still felt sure, I could come back to see her, and we would talk it over again. I never believed Holy Mother would give me such advice! I was really shocked!”
And then, in a stunning, buttonholing move, Clarkson sits down at the edge of the stage and dangles her legs over it. Her hope and hurt are in our laps. “That was the winter of senior year,” she says. “Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.” The curtain line hits like a punch to the heart. And the evening is Clarkson’s.
Long Day’s Journey into Night is on at Wyndham’s Theatre, in London, until June 8
John Lahr is a Columnist at AIR MAIL and the first critic to win a Tony Award, for co-authoring Elaine Stritch at Liberty