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

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". 

This play is set over one day in 1912 in a rundown summer home in Connecticut, where James and Mary Tyrone and their two adult sons have convened, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. It's a "gruelling" experience, as "the family's points of weakness and pain" are revealed, but it's brought to vivid life by Herrin's "stark" production. Cox is "thrilling", but it's Patricia Clarkson as his "morphine fiend" wife who really shines, with a "true, infuriating, compassionate portrait of an addict". There's strong support from Laurie Kynaston as Edmund, a failed poet with tuberculosis, and Daryl McCormack as Jamie, a failed actor and drunk. "This is the ultimate family reckoning, with some light, but mostly shade."

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Alas, the strong performances can't prevent "long-winded confrontations and confessions from slipping into melodrama", as O'Neill "grinds us into submission" over an "achingly slow" evening, said Clive Davis in The Times. The final scene of this "workmanlike" production, where Mary delivers a "crushingly poignant" speech, is desperately moving.

"But it's a long time a-coming." It's a pity this great play wasn't given a more innovative staging, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out. While the works of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams have been much reinvented recently, O'Neill's seem resistant to change. This is a tender production, but something of "a museum piece".

Wyndham’s Theatre, London WC2 (0344-482 5151). Until 8 June Running time: 3hrs ★★★

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