Long Day's Journey into Night review: a 'challenging' play with 'superb' performances

Brian Cox gives a 'magnetic' performance as ageing actor James Tyrone

Brian Cox in Long Day's Journey into Night
Succession star Brian Cox leaves his mark on this difficult play
(Image credit: Johan Persson)

In the ten years since Brian Cox last appeared on the London stage, he has "supercharged his fame", said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph – thanks to his TV role as Logan Roy, the domineering paterfamilias in Succession. It is apt, then, that he has now taken on "one of the mightiest father figures in the 20th-century American canon" – the ageing, bitter actor James Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical masterpiece. 

It's a famously long and challenging play, said Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard. But Jeremy Herrin's production is "full of pathos and ruined grandeur", with uniformly superb performances. Cox is "magnetic as Tyrone, volcanic one moment, maudlin the next"; his "bombastic soliloquies" are "compelling". 

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