Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill. Sydney Theatre Company directed by Andrew Upton at Sydney Theatre, June 29 – August 1, 2010
Reviewed by Frank McKone, July 14.
If
you have read about O’Neill’s personal life you will understand the
significance of the title of this long play, which ran 3 hours 40
minutes (including a 20 minute interval). Alcoholism, drug addiction
and suicide were subjects he could not avoid, though he did put off
writing this gruelling story until 1941, as the Parkinson’s-like
neurodegenerative disease known as cortical cerebellar atrophy began to
take hold, preventing him from writing ever again, until his death in
1953.
Some commentators see O’Neill as taking up, for
the first time in America, the Chekovian tradition of realism, but this
is not true of most of his work. His characters and plots are full of
symbolism, even though he employs apparently naturalistic forms of
dialogue. In fact, each of his plays is an experiment in theatrical
form. He was an innovator, an inventor never fully satisfied with his
last creation.
Before Long Day’s Journey Into Night only his structured study of racial discrimination in All God’s Chillun Got Wings produced a drama of ordinary internal family relations. But Long Day
is a searing journey to the centre of the night which, in my opinion,
has not been undertaken by any other playwright since Shakespeare wrote
Hamlet.
I’ll come back to themes later, but my first
concern is whether or not Upton and his cast – Robyn Nevin as wife and
mother Mary, William Hurt as husband, father and actor James Tyrone,
Todd van Voris as eldest son James, and Luke Mullins as younger
surviving son Edmund, and not forgetting Emily Russell as Mary’s
household employee Cathleen – would have had any hope of satisfying the
author who claimed, I believe, not to wish to see his plays on stage
because he could always do a better production in his own imagination.
If
the performance I saw had not been a matinee, requiring us to accept
only two curtain-call appearances before the cast took a break to
prepare for the evening, I’m sure the demands of those calling for a
standing ovation would have been granted by the whole audience on a
third appearance. Despite Edmund’s disparagement of James Tyrone’s
old-style Irish Catholicism, almost certainly true of Eugene O’Neill’s
attitude towards his actor-father James O’Neill’s religion, it would not
be hard to imagine the author, looking down from theatrical heaven,
with satisfied eyes.
The acting was, as we expect from STC, superb.
Emily
Russell’s small but crucial role is a great example. In a family full
of delusions, Cathleen is a normal person, seeing the funny side of
situations, wanting to please but standing up for herself, recognising
the realities of her job as household help and maintaining a commonsense
relationship between her drug-affected employer and Bridget, the terror
in the kitchen whom we never see but get to know well. After a first
act which takes us out to interval wondering if we can cope any more
with the twists and turns of bickering, accusations, regrets and
unsuccessful attempts to express love, Russell opens Act 2 with a large
and ebullient Cathleen bringing out a vivacity in Mary so enjoyable to
see that we can believe that Mary can perhaps achieve her sanity. Yet
it is Russell’s Cathleen who suddenly has to step back as she realises
that Mary’s responses to normal enjoyment of life are abnormal.
Cathleen knows how to deal with Bridget the kitchen tyro, but this is
beyond dealing with. Russell loses nothing of Cathleen’s open
personality, but by the time she leaves the stage we know what she
knows, and we wonder how on earth this family will end its days.
As
the long drunken evening winds it misty way around the men, each little
gust of interaction sometimes seeming a little warmer but trending icy
overall, we wait in dread. If we ever see Mary emerge from the spare
room again, what will we see? It is Robyn Nevin’s triumph that, after
perhaps an hour off-stage, in the dead of night her Mary is such a sad,
sad figure that when she stands so still and speaks we are completely
absorbed. When she stops speaking we are silent. No-one breaks as the
lights slowly dim, and we even feel a bit tentative about beginning to
applaud when the lights come up to relieve the intensity with
appreciation for such actors.
Of course, without three
men to match, no woman could produce such a Mary. Each one had his
element of surprise. Tyrone, the “great” actor, was not the expected
booming theatrical cliché voice. Often he spoke too fast to pick up all
the words, sometimes seeming as if William Hurt was not quite in
control of his role. But think of the complexity of an actor playing
the role of an actor who only feels himself to be in control when he is
acting before an audience. At “home” he has no audience, only a wife
and sons who see through him. He is at home on the stage, or used to be
in his hey-day, but he is no more than an illusion in this house which
even looks like a run-down one-night stand hotel room. And we are
watching William Hurt in this illusion on stage before us, his
audience. So Hurt was right to show us Tyrone unable to maintain the
cliché, too mentally messed-up to sound out the booming foghorn voice.
James
was a visual surprise to me. I had never imagined him as rotund as
Todd van Voris appeared. I suppose my cliché expectation was that he
would be a drunken broken down version of his tall square-shouldered
theatrically heroic father, as William Hurt appeared. But this was the
son who deliberately rejected his father’s appearance of athleticism,
even though he showed that he was, at least when sober, a more sincere
actor than his father. And, in his cups, this James was a capable clown
– until his cups overflowed, spilling his insecurity all over the floor
in the final scenes, and the clown could only watch the horror of his
mother, and do nothing.
Even though I knew the story of
O’Neill’s tuberculosis, and thus Edmund’s “consumption”, and expected a
sick looking Luke Mullins, his slimness looked so thin against van
Voris’s roundness that at once his cough said what we needed to know.
So casting was not just a matter of finding actors who could act,
especially actors who could act actors when they were acting and when
they were not, as well as actors who can act characters who are always
pretending, sometimes deliberately but often subconsciously. Casting
was also about design to create images of the characters which tell the
story visually. And this was very well done.
The
design, too, of the claustrophobic ugly room, looking cheap and yet also
reminiscent of the sort of ship’s cabin that O’Neill himself would have
inhabited as a rough merchant seaman, set the atmosphere to dead
astern. But rather than hold us in this confinement for three hours,
lighting and gaps in the wings allowed us to see out a little and place
this dead centre in the beginnings of a context: the hedge out front,
the verandah, the dining room, the street which led to the pub. But
there were only small disturbing sounds from the spare room upstairs,
where Mary had her “naps”. This was just sufficient for us to survive
our time with this family – well done again.
The play
operates on three levels, and Andrew Upton has allowed O’Neill’s writing
to reveal them all. First, conflicts within each of the personalities
become apparent in more and more detail as the second level, conflict
within the family between the individuals, grows apace. These are the
levels at which we respond to the action on stage as we watch. The
intricacies of the interactions make this play one of the greatest
written in the 20th Century and an outstanding play historically.
The
third level is not made explicit on stage, yet is shown in clues – put
there by O’Neill – which may be cryptic. This is an American play.
What does it say about America? Upton, as director, has not only made
sure the first two levels are fully developed, but he has been careful
to put issues before us which are core questions in American culture.
The
“ould country” is Ireland, and the accents of the two generations,
compared also with the original Irish of the immigrant worker Cathleen,
bring out the issue of change which we know so well in Australia. This
is fine voice design which, like good lighting, is done so well that it
is not noticed. But it establishes the credentials and credibility of
this production, and I bet that O’Neill’s ghost is pleased. This is
because the theme of the migration to America and the consequential
belief in the “American Dream” is crucial to appreciating O’Neill’s
sense of tragedy.
It is not just a story of
characters who fall into the traps of alcohol and morphine addiction,
for whom we may feel sorrow as they effectively commit suicide (as
O’Neill’s sons did in real life – one only three years before O’Neill
himself died). It is the story of the failure of America to know itself
– to understand that the Dream is a delusion, that America is not the
great heroic nation it believes itself to be, that America cannot impose
dictates upon others while maintaining its belief in freedom, that even
within its own culture the dream of never-ending success for everyone
is an impossible dream.
We see the effects of the
American Dream played out in the news every day, and even in Australia
(where we tell ourselves that we don’t accept authority, with a
philosophy of “no bullshit”) we follow America into unwinnable wars and
people constantly talk of achieving their dream. O’Neill’s play is a
warning: the dream is a self-destructive delusion.
Yet
the irony is that to create this drama on the stage so effectively, as
Upton and his team have done, is to prove that O’Neill’s “dream” can be
fulfilled – perhaps better even than in his imagination. Watch
Cathleen, the minor character of no apparent importance but the only one
who will survive.
If you have to miss the Sydney
season, your next opportunity is at the Newmark Theatre, Artists
Repertory Theatre, Portland, Oregon USA, August 13-29, where it will be
followed by Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness in September.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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