OUR VERDICT
It is a peculiar human capacity to live in relative comfort in a stunning location like the New England seaside and yet remain utterly miserable. The particular genius of Eugene O’Neill is that he is so able to demonstrate how that comes about.
At the core of this is memory; the things we just can’t get out of our heads, coming back to haunt us in the night. Tensions in families arise when each of us has a different way of remembering and a divergent way of coming to terms with this.
Long Day’s Journey into Night depicts these contesting recollections across one day in the wrangle of a family of four, mother, father and two grown-up yet immature sons, plus a maid who flits in and out, wittering on about lunch and the weather, embodying the bourgeois state of denial that O’Neill clearly despised.
They are in disarray due to past events and current emergencies for which they have a diverse array of addictions: drink, drugs, gambling, sex and impatiently waiting for said lunch. It is striking that O’Neill wrote of these contemporary challenges in the 1940s, about events in his own family in the 1910s. Plus ça change... He was determined to offer some honesty as a counterpoint to what he apparently called the ‘eternal show shop of Broadway’. Perhaps that’s why he won the Nobel Prize.
But all of this makes it a very challenging piece to do, so reliant as it is on five actors depicting this claustrophobic intensity in lengthy and sophisticated eloquence and in a specifically observed Irish-American, middle-class, New England summer seaside accent.
The four main characters go through a sequence of one-to-one and collective conversations, across four wordy acts, in turn, badgering, comforting and then badgering again. This requires a huge stage presence.
One wonders why amateur dramatic companies, even able and experienced ones like the Richmond Shakespeare Society, choose this type of work when we can only compare them to the likes of Jack Lemmon, Vanessa Redgrave, Katherine Hepburn, David Suchet, Kevin Spacey and even Olivier, who all made their mark with this piece. They are rarely going to come off well in comparison.
So do they pull it off?
Well, nearly I’d say. I would particularly cite Dorothy Duffy, who plays the Mother, (‘Mary’ of course). Her tortuous vacillation between twittering about the weather and reminiscing with deep grief and guilt about her lost child is movingly earnest.
O’Neill clearly loved his mother. His father, on the other hand, was a different story, and Francis Abbot does a creditable job of portraying the brooding self-pity of Mary’s husband, James Tyrone.
The two feckless youths James Jr. and Edmund are well-enough sketched by Luciano Dodero and George Abbot. The latter (based largely on O’Neill himself) is believably consumptive.
Dorothy-as-Mary stands out.
Perhaps that’s also because she has some of the best lines, including the play’s essential ‘The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too.’
Direction by Simon Bartlett was sensibly unfussy, allowing O’Neill’s complexity to do the talking. The set had a shabbiness to it that one hoped was deliberate but occasionally the sound engineer got above themselves with sea side-effects that slightly distracted.
This is the first time I’ve been to the Mary Wallace Theatre. It is a beautiful setting by the river on a crystal clear night. Fittingly (or not?) hosting a play that so strongly features addiction, the bar stocked an excellent and very reasonably priced selection of Whisky, which of course we had to try to honour the mood.
This is a tough play about people enduring because and in spite of each other. O’Neill (excellently portrayed by Jack Nicholson in the film Reds, incidentally) clearly wasn’t a very happy man. The Richmond Shakespeare should be applauded for making a good enough fist of his miserable eloquence.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night By Eugene O’Neill performed by Richmond Shakespeare Society at The Mary Wallace Theatre, Twickenham (book here)
Dates: 18-25 January 2020
