I love going to see a play I know nothing about. I had heard of Eugene Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, but that was all. This production was on a very short national tour before it's London run (Bath, Nottingham, Glasgow) and I was lucky it took in Milton Keynes. The programme describes this as Neill's most autobiographical play, so when you learn his family was plagued by alcohol, drugs and death, you know this is not going to be a fun evening. But what a superb drama unfolds. O'Neill is credited with having "the gift of the gab", and this is indeed a very wordy play. The four family members talk long and fast about their lives. So again, not knowing the play, concentration is needed to take in their story.
A tremendous credit therefore goes to the director and all four actors for bringing the dialogue to life. David Suchet as the father James Tyrone (tyrannical?) is so good, you instantly forget that this actor played the role of Poirot on TV so many times. Laurie Metcalf, an original member of Chicago's 36 year old Steppenwolf Theatre, brings grace and fallibility to James' wife Mary, and the two boys played by Kyle Soller and Trevor White are also brilliant. There are actually some very funny moments. Isn't it strange how you can find yourself the only one laughing, as I did when, in a reference to Shakespeare who James repeatedly mentions, and on the appearance at the top of the stairs of the ghostlike Mary, son James exclaims "The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia". Yes, they are all pretty nasty to each other a lot of the time.
One note about the terrific set. The seaside house reminded me of many we saw last year on Cape Cod. When the programme mentions O'Neill's collaboration with the Provincetown Players, we must have walked the same streets at the end of the peninsula as he did from 1916 onwards. This company gave him his New York debut in 1920 with Beyond the Horizon which won him the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes.
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