The overbearing patriarch in Eugene O’Neill’s semi-autobiographical drama is an actor who feels his profession has been straitjacketed by typecasting. May James Tyrone be talking for Brian Cox too who, enjoying him, steps nearly seamlessly from Succession’s paterfamilias to O’Neill’s flawed father marshalling obstreperous sons?
Even when so, Cox is, as at all times, thrilling to observe. But it’s Patricia Clarkson as his “morphine fiend” of a spouse, simply returned from a sanatorium and tumbling again into dependancy, who steals the present. Clarkson exudes vulnerability together with laborious denial. For all of the play’s interval components – it’s set in 1912 – hers seems like a real, infuriating, compassionate portrait of an addict.
Tyrone is much less textured, a disgruntled and judgmental father switching between anger, flecks of wry humour and expressions of affection.
First staged posthumously in 1956 in opposition to O’Neill’s instruction that it not be dramatised for 25 years after his demise, it’d characterize the gruelling apex of basic American dysfunction household dramas. We spend a day with the Tyrones, through the course of which the supply of Maria’s dependancy is revealed together with the household’s factors of weak spot and ache, from James’s tight-fistedness and tendencies in direction of drink to wrangles between his sons, Edmund (Laurie Kynaston), a failed poet with TB, and Jamie (Daryl McCormack), a failed actor and drunk.
Underneath Jeremy Herrin’s path, the manufacturing doesn’t search to leaven the drama’s gloomy spirit: it’s a lengthy, speaking play with little motion delicately well-crafted which slides between home trade and accusation, anger, emotional conflagration.
Right here it’s stripped to its elemental state because the household convene of their summer season house and vacillate between love and hate. Anger is tempered by anxious love that paradoxically appear to gas one another’s varied addictions: mother and father wring their fingers over Edmund’s sickness, sons wring theirs over their mom’s soul-sapping dependancy.
In a single pique, Maria tells James the household home has by no means felt like a house and Lizzie Clachan’s set, spare and picket, displays her sentiment. It has the look of early American puritanism, Shaker-like in its easy traces, extreme color palette and glossy lighting (by Jack Knowles). There are doorways inside doorways, it appears, which gesture in direction of Maria’s sense of being spied upon too, though the set-up, as empty as it’s, doesn’t fairly carry a way of over-heated crowdedness.
“There’s gloom within the air you may minimize with a knife,” says James. He’s proper. This drama is so stark it appears nearly Beckettian, regardless of its naturalism. But there’s forgiveness and tenderness between the laborious edges, particularly between Maria and James – Cox and Clarkson have a beautiful, pure chemistry. And though characters spiral into resentment and rage, they at all times return to like and togetherness, which makes this distinct from the emotional desolations of a Tennessee Williams drama.
Louisa Harland, for her half, is so efficient because the household maid, Cathleen, that you really want extra of her. She lifts each scene she is in, turning a useful function into a comic book spotlight.
Some scenes glitter with darkish vitality, and are actually tragic. Others really feel protracted, the play’s old school exposition uncovered, and the over-used gadget of characters narrating reminiscences feeling like prolonged confessions. The circularity of household argument and accusation, are grinding too, and don’t at all times take up us, emotionally.
At three and a half hours it feels withering. Then once more, that’s the level right here. That is the final word household reckoning, with some gentle, however principally shade.
