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These are snippets from Reviews of Paul's first West End appearance, Long Day's Journey Into Night. If you have subscribed to our Greeny club, you can get the full text of these reviews in the message archives.
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Benedict Nightingale, The Times:
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Paul Taylor, The Independent:
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Jessica Lange is a surprising first among equals in a stunning Long Day's Journey into Night
After a diet of Twiglets and cheese puffs, isn't it invigorating to find a big plateful of beef bleeding on to the table? We've seen movie stars and celebs galore in the West End of late, most of them giving mildly enjoyable performances in mildly amusing entertainments. But here at the Lyric are Jessica Lange and Charles Dance in what is probably the finest and certainly the most emotionally raw of American plays - and both act way beyond what I had patronisingly assumed to be their abilities.
It's long and gruelling, but it's rewarding in ways no post-Jacobean English play has been. Certainly, it makes most un-English demands on its cast. I had slight doubts about Paul Rudd's Jamie and Paul Nicholls's Edmund, but when they came to the great scene in which the one acknowledges his destructive love for the other, both found the intensity to override them. And Dance gives the most unsentimental performance I've seen from him, finding toughness, bitterness and anger in the frustrated actor - and even managing to look like the pinched, scraggy-haired Scrooge his sons accuse him of being.
And Lange is, if anything, more adventurous and surprising. From the first she's generous with the glazed, brittle smiles of the secret addict, but that pose is undermined by her writhing hands and nervous glances, as well as by her occasionally huddled body-language and cornered-animal looks. And when she's more or less admitted the humiliating facts of her drug habit she finds plenty of emotional variety in the role: defiance, cynicism, a dreamy nostalgia as she drifts towards oblivion, and pain, deep pain.
She even discovers a little sex in the character. When Mary tells the maid how she met the glamorous Tyrone, and decided to marry him rather than fulfil her plan to become a nun, Lange lolls on a sofa, sensuously reliving the memory. A bit later, Dance strokes her, his hands affectionately kneading her breasts. Robin Phillips's production is the first in my experience to acknowledge that, however badly things have gone since, it was physical love that tied together the Tyrones.
Sometimes it's as if Lange were a mist looking into the fog outside the house. Sometimes she's all too human, slumping to her knees or bursting into racking tears as she confronts truths she finds impossible to bear. Always she's riveting. Thanks to her and the rest of Phillips's cast, I left the Lyric knowing I had seen a masterpiece.
Jessica Lange, as the morphine-addicted mother in Eugene O'Neill's epic play A Long Day's Journey Into Night, can take the breath away on a stage as well as on film. Moreover, Robin Phillips's production of this play about a family so dysfunctional they make the Windsors look like the Waltons, is beautifully judged, bringing out how closely the harrowing and the hilarious come to resemble each other in O'Neill's lengthy guts-out-on-the-table piece.
In Simon Higlett's fine design, Tyrone's lack of domestic care for his clan is signalled by the fact that the frame of the house is open to the elements, with the mist swirling in from the nearby fog-horn-crowded sea. On this immediately involving arena, the excellent cast honour O'Neill's drama by playing the warped, manipulative minutiae of the family's scab-picking relationships with great spontaneity and wrong-footing changes of direction rather than, as often happens, by giving us a Greatest Hits run-down of its Big Themes. This brood pass blame and guilt round in the routine, almost casual way that some families pass round the nuts.
In a wasp-waisted eau-de-nil outfit and with her hair piled into a fetishistically magnificent coiffure, Lange's morphine-addicted Mary is a porcelain figurine that is a mass of hair-line cracks and denial. She shows how this brittle character fends off the awful truth about herself with all kinds of wiles. Sometimes, her face radiates a smiling, girlish acceptance of a flattery that is actually no longer forthcoming. And, sometimes, she weeps with a dreadful authenticity.
As her retired thesp husband, Charles Dance, with his peeled-prawn sensitive eyes and witty, dismissive timing, gives a cleverly low-key performance, showing you all the ache of remembered desire in the way his fingers sometimes itch to caress and comfort her.
But it's the younger generation, Paul Rudd and Paul Nicholls, who are sensational as the two sons. Their scenes together are both terribly funny and truly agonising. This pair expertly capture the electric intimacy and rivalry of youths who have, on the one hand, been set at odds by their difficult, addictive parents and, on the other, been brought too close together by the shared burden of them. There's a terrific suddenness, an unpredictable, joky-murderous rapport in the relationship; I have never seen intensity acted with such a feel for its bathos rather than its pathos.
There's no place so sour as home. That's the ultimate state of play in Long Day's Journey into Night, Eugene O'Neill's painfully autobiographical domestic tragedy, written in 1941 and now enjoying (if that's the right word) a fine revival at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue. It stars Jessica Lange and Charles Dance and is admirably unsentimental.
At first glance in Robin Phillips's production, the Tyrone family's summer residence in New England looks idyllic. Sunshine is slanting across the porch into a spacious, colonial-style parlour. Dance's silver-haired patriarch, James Snr, is fondly embracing his elegant wife, Lange's Mary, and she smiles back sweetly.
But keep looking and you discern the light is chilly and the pretty white-wood furnishings look soiled and mouldy. Lange's fingers are neurotically twisting and tugging at her lace handkerchief. Dance has bouts of brooding anger about his apparently good-for-nothing sons. From upstairs you can also hear obviously consumptive coughing – even if Lange is in denial, clinging to the upbeat diagnosis that her youngest, Edmund (Paul Nicholls), has nothing but a summer cold.
By the end of the night, we see this is a chronically dysfunctional clan who can't shake off past griefs, are plagued by disappointment and mental instability, and are being destroyed by their mutual recriminations and their addictions to whisky and morphine. No wonder the house seems to be in meltdown – its walls proving insubstantial as fog swirls in and the skies darken.
Undeniably, there are longueurs in Long Day's Journey. O'Neill sometimes underlines his themes of blame and dishonesty just too repetitively. And occasionally, Phillips's cast excessively point up their anxieties, Nicholls's manic laughter striking a particularly false note. Yet, overall, this is an illuminating portrait of ensnaring family dynamics with some wonderful flashes of black humour en route.
DO we need another Hollywood star treading the London stage? No sooner has Home Alone prodigy Macaulay Culkin settled into Madame Melville, and Daryl Hannah braved The Seven Year Itch, than along comes Jessica Lange, slipping into Eugene O'Neill's classic 1941 drama of family dysfunction, first performed (posthumously) in 1956.
Well, if all the imports are as good as Ms Lange, then let's stuff Shaftesbury Avenue with Tinseltown's finest. Unfortunately, while one can only applaud her decision to return here after starring in Peter Hall's A Streetcar Named Desire three years ago, it has to be said that Robin Phillips's production doesn't show her pitch-perfect performance off to best effect.
This three-and-a-half-hour voyage round the unhappy Tyrone family, set in New England in 1912, takes an enervatingly long while to draw you in, largely because of some lacklustre turns from Lange's male co-stars.
Lange brings us into haunting acquaintance with an all-American mother and wife suffocating herself and those around her through neurosis and paranoia. Her trimly dressed form can't hide the anxiety: she won't let go of a handkerchief, look others in the eye, or let a smile break for long through her down-turned lips.
Charles Dance's failed actor and money-grubbing landowner of a husband sits stolidly at the living-room table, occasionally deigning to frown. And where is the passion and vitriol that should drive his sons? Paul Rudd is disappointingly sober as the high-living waster James Jr. Former EastEnders star Paul Nicholls lends an inappropriately healthy-looking, unliterary air to the younger Edmund, whose poetic aspirations look to be dashed by consumption.
The problem is partly O'Neill's doing: the static, verbose quality of the play subdues the characters. But if you hold with the action, the playwright's uncomfortable observations about the self-destructive nature of the family unit finally work their old potency.
As whiskey loosens the tongues of the menfolk, Lange's fellow actors come into their own, grow quick to quarrel, and join her in summoning the loss, recrimination and heartache that flesh is heir to. It's worth the slog, but only just.
Jessica Lange at first seems surprising casting as Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's great family drama. Lange has a feisty, resilient quality whereas one thinks of Mary as a pathetic victim of morphine and her husband's miserliness. But one of the surprises in Robin Phillips's excellent revisionist production is to show Mary to be as much emotional vampire as helpless addict.
O'Neill's play was famously written "in tears and blood". Set in a gaunt New England house in 1912, it offers a thinly disguised portrait of the author's own family. James Tyrone is a penny-pinching actor who wasted his precious talent on a profit-making potboiler. His wife, Mary, became drug-dependent after the traumatic birth of her youngest son, Edmund, who is now an aspiring, consumptive poet. And Edmund's brother Jamie is a cynical wastrel visibly contemptuous of his skinflint father and hophead mother.
Lange, in a magnificently unsentimental performance, reminds us that Mary is a woman who constantly twists the knife in the family's wounds. You can argue that her addiction is to blame; and Lange captures astonishingly Mary's transition during the day from nervous, hankie-twisting tension to dreamy narcotic escape. But, without judging the character, Lange shows it is her endless picking at the familial scabs that is the real source of agony.
Correspondingly, Charles Dance suggests that James Tyrone's parsimony stems from childhood poverty and his Dickensian sweatshop experience, and he brings out superbly the man's muted despair and quiet love.
Even if Paul Rudd as the self-loathing Jamie and Paul Nicholls as the sensitive Edmund offer more familiar performances, you have the exhilarating experience of rediscovering the great American dramatic classic. You go in expecting an endurance-test; you emerge as if having seen O'Neill's play for the first time.
Reviewer's Rating:
In Robin Phillips's eerie, emotional production, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night emerges as a ghost play without equal in the 20th century Anglo-American repertoire
Jessica Lange's poignant, morphine-addicted materfamilias, Mary Tyrone, makes her last appearance as if quite possessed. There are, it's true, no spectral figures, no literal spooks or things that go bump in the night, apart from Paul Rudd's drunken son, James junior, come stumbling home. But how overwhelmingly the Tyrone family are haunted by the past, by what they have suffered together and what's unique to each of them.
This haunting process runs all through the foggy summer day in 1912 that frames the harrowing action. Phillips's production, skilfully subduing O'Neill's tendency to purple his prose and his characters, ensures Long Day's Journey becomes a seriously thrilling voyage of discovery. The play's fascination has to do with its remorseless laying or unlaying of ghosts: Mary's return to the comfort of morphine, first suspected as the play begins, and the diagnosis of the illness of her younger son Edmund impels painful trips down memory lane and facing up to what's been concealed and evaded.
Simon Higlett's terrific, expressionistic staging discovers and emphasises a ghostly, dream-struck motif. For the play's traditional American homestead, Higlett supplies gauze walls, paneless windows, an untimbered ceiling through which fog floats and even a picture frame that lacks a picture.
Miss Lange's makes an unusually youthful Mary. But as the day wears on and the secret supply of morphine wears in, Miss Lange's performance acquires a riveting, glazed precariousness that makes Mary's refusal to admit the truth about herself all the more desperate and pathetic. Her sudden losses of composure, her mustering of cool irony, her tearful collapse when finally admitting her dread that Paul Nicholl's stoic, impressively stricken Edmund will die of consumption, would disarm even the most stony cynic. Later, sprawled out upon the sofa, her becalmed Mary, dreamily set upon recalling the happiness of her first encounter with James, is high with pathos as well as drugs.
Dance's Tyrone, lacking a secure American accent and interestingly refusing to play up James's mercurial, actorish emotionalism, cuts an effective suave, skinflint figure, generous only with his sexual attentions. Rudd, superb as the alcoholic son whose cruel tongue lets rip, raises the emotional temperature in compensation.
Reviewer's Rating:
At three and a half hours and two intervals, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night is something of an endurance test. But if you and your backside can tough it out, you won't be disappointed.
Considered one of America's greatest dramas. And in this sensitive production directed by Robin Phillips, it more than matches up to its reputation as a masterpiece of modern theatre.
The family is brought to life in Phillips' production by an all-star cast who are, without fail, terrific. Jessica Lange plays mother Mary with echoes of a young Katherine Hepburn, hair piled atop her head. Lange captures perfectly the junkie's spiralling decline. We watch in horror as, during a day's passing, her composure cracks and shatters, the caginess and nervous wringing of hands and fidgeting giving way to drugged-out stupor. Though she owes her addiction to the years-ago prescriptions of a quack doctor, Mary is hardly blameless in the household trauma. She never misses a chance to stick the emotional knife in, piercing her family's individual guilts and weaknesses.
The other Tyrones claim their fair share of bitterness and recriminations, too, but none come across as unsympathetic. Amidst moments of battle, they demonstrate real love towards each other and also deeply-felt personal wounds, nursed touchingly. In the third act, the male characters come into their own as those wounds are licked. The father recalls his impoverished youth and his betrayal of his art, and more shockingly, Paul Rudd's sozzled Jamie reveals his destructive feelings towards his younger brother (Paul Nicholls).
Aside from the family and their maid (Olivia Colman), there is another dominating character present in this production - the fog that engulfs proceedings and Simon Higlett's rendition of the Tyrones' drab summer house. It swirls above open rafters and behind translucent walls, it infuses the dialogue, insulates the action and clouds the family's judgements hauntingly.
And the overall effect of the fog and the fine acting and the electric emotion on the audience? Utterly mesmerising, even after three and a half hours and a sore backside.
Under the direction of Robin Phillips, Long Day's Journey into Night is expressively, moodily staged and has a shining performance from Jessica Lange. It also has slow, cumbersome stretches. It looks by turns urgent and awkward.
On this occasion, there's a huge unevenness. Charles Dance, presumably anxious not to overdo the actor-laddie aspect of the husband, underdoes it. Paul Nicholls, compelling as an impaired, desirable youth in EastEnders, is too robust for the consumptive son. Paul Rudd plays his raffish, troubled brother with too much determination, too little abandon.
But Lange is magnificent. As a fog-horn hoots, Simon Higlett's design - a faded traditional sitting-room - is invaded by billows of mist: Lange makes you feel it's her mind that's being infiltrated. With Katharine Hepburn's haughtiness and wobbly grace, she plants the signs of floating away into addiction: a woozy garrulousness; the hands that pick away at a handkerchief. But her bold move, which spreads like fire through the production, is to be dislikeable. She has the manipulativeness of the addict and the addict's cleverness. She turns wistful moments into barbs: 'I'm sorry,' she says to her husband, as she delivers a harrowing, guilt-inducing memory, 'I remembered out loud.'
The illusion of paradise lost - how many great and good 20th century plays were about this theme! Delusion though it be, it is this image of remembered bliss that brings an extraordinary, winged lyricism to the American master-dramatist Eugene O'Neill's bleak classic Long Day's Journey into Night. As the title tells you, the play takes you further and further into dark sorrow, and yet it ends - how ironically - with the tender soaring memories of its heroine, Mary Tyrone. She is now so far gone on morphine that all she knows is the past. O'Neill's 1941 play is modern - he is the father and grandfather of modern American drama - and yet he ends it with a mad scene: a brilliant twist.
You go further into Mary's thoughts at the very moment when you know that they are no longer sane. You feel, too, the harrowing grief of her husband and two sons. And her thoughts are of that lovely period of adolescent choice - when she might have become a nun, or a concert pianist, or a wife to the handsome actor James Tyrone - the period before the realities of adult life hemmed her in.
The new West End production of Long Day's Journey into Night is superb - the best for at least a decade - and what is most fascinating is precisely that it shows how blame and guilt and love ricochet around a single family. We often hear that this is O'Neill's most autobiographical play: but so what? This enthralling play - how one could sense it drawing the West End first-night audience, hushed, into its spell - is heartbreaking, tender, even funny, to us today not because of what it tells us about O'Neill's family but because of what it tells us of any family. It is not a play for Polyannas. Husband (here Charles Dance) blames wife, eldest son, youngest son. Wife (here Jessica Lange) blames husband, eldest son, youngest son, and doctors. Eldest son blames father, mother, younger brother. She takes morphine. The three men drink too much, ruinously so in the case of the eldest son. The husband is miserly and, like his wife, feels that he has never fulfilled his potential. The youngest son has - it emerges - consumption.
This production, however, is the first I have seen that shows how much intimacy and affection still bind the Tyrones together. At first, this does not seem the case. All four actors seem to be in slightly different plays, and one is aware of calculation. Quickly, though, this dissolves. There are flaws: there is not much of the Victorian actor about Charles Dance as the actor-manager James Tyrone; Paul Rudd's account of James is short on its alcoholic laceration; Paul Nicholls's American accent as the consumptive Edmund does not always ring true, and the rhythms of his consumptive breathing and movements are not always accurate; Jessica Lange has a few physical effects - the over-bright smile, the outstretched swan-wing arms - that feel contrived. The play, running at three hours and a half, has been cut. But the actors pull you in, and you believe in them the more as a family precisely as family life seems forever ruined. As the cycle of blame and guilt keeps turning, you feel how well the family already knows it. How many times a well-known grievance is avoided; how much mutual respect still lingers; how much resigned acceptance of grim fact is evident.
Lange's Mary - though highly affecting - is no simple victim. I have never heard before just how much passive aggression there is in this role. "I'm not blaming you", "I always forgive you", "I love you, dear, in spite of everything", and (most chilling) "I'm sorry I remembered out loud": every touch of emotional manipulation is exposed here. Yet how finely she hears the music in the role; how sensitively she catches both the lighter voice of remembered innocence and the harsher edge of keen experience. Dance is especially fine in his quiet scene of self-revelation with Edmund; Rudd's response to all the other characters is vivid and convincing; and Nicholls's Edmund - in many ways the focal point of the play, its one lingering if endangered ray of hope - is touching and poetic. There are only two terrible ingredients: the Really Useful Theatre's tacky/luvvie Theatregoer programme, and the posey curtain-calls. A great play, here shown with its pain and tenderness and lyricism beating beautifully.
The Bill Kenwright revival of "Long Day's Journey Into Night" brings the director Robin Phillips back to London after far too long in Canada. And it brings back to Shaftesbury Avenue, also after far too long, an affirmation of the very essence of great theater.
Eugene O'Neill's relentless, poetic portrayal of his own early family life, written as he said in his own tears and blood, may not be the greatest American drama of the last century, but it is where that drama started. Arthur Miller (for the head) and Tennessee Williams (for the heart) would take it all forward, cutting, shaping and focusing their equally haunting and scorched family memoirs in a way that O'Neill himself could never quite manage. But this is still the fountainhead, the first modern play to find tragedy in personal revelation.
Its claim to greatness is in the cost to O'Neill of the story he relates, the story of the O'Neills, thinly disguised here as the Tyrones: James, the aging, skinflint actor who has destroyed himself by clinging to the same role for 30 years; Mary, his wife, hopelessly addicted to morphine and her memories of a better time, and Jamie, the elder brother, determined that Eugene shall not succeed as a playwright where he has already failed as an alcoholic.
Theirs is a truly terrible story. Across nearly four hours we are swept along on a tidal wave of pity and despair. "Wanna hear my memories?" asks one son at one point of revelation and recrimination. That could have been a subtitle. The anguish is all, but Phillips, at the Lyric, has gone for a deliberately low-key and almost defiantly untheatrical production, as if aware that this long night's journey is already peopled by the ghosts not only of the O'Neill clan, but also of Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Jason Robards, all the player kings and queens who have made this play their own in living memory.
As a result, Charles Dance is almost too intelligent, too restrained for the old barnstormer, while Jessica Lange only at the last allows the majesty of her grief to overwhelm her. As the sons, Paul Rudd and Paul Nicholls are similarly low-key, and the entire cast sometimes seems a little too young for their roles. And yet, this is a new reading for a new century. The play is still such stuff as nightmares are made of, and what we lose in grandeur we gain in insight. This is the close-up, not the long-shot, but it is no less impressive, no less haunting on Simon Higlett's brilliantly fog shrouded set.
The Tyrones are a dysfunctional family in meltdown, dragged out of the memory long before either of those clinical terms was ever coined. Yet their story remains the defining moment of the modern American theater, and Lange and Phillips remind us just how great that theater could be, and just how vast remains our debt to O'Neill.
Related Pages: The Work | The Gallery | Interviews
External Links: eOneill.com: An Electronic Eugene O'Neill Archive | Eugene O'Neill - American Playwright | Royal National Theatre, London, May-June 1991, various reviews | Chatshow.net Interview when Paul was in Long Day's Journey
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This Page created: 27 August, 2000
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