Current location:Culture Currents news portal > opinions
Succession's Brian Cox stars in an American stage epic... but at three
Culture Currents news portal2024-05-22 10:07:05【opinions】6People have gathered around
IntroductionLong Day’s Journey Into NightWyndham’s Theatre, LondonRating: Was ever a play better titled? Eugene
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Wyndham’s Theatre, London
Was ever a play better titled? Eugene O’Neill’s 1941 autobiographical American drama now starring Brian Cox as an actor-manager and patriarch of a dysfunctional family is sometimes hailed as one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. But at three-and-a-half hours it can also feel like a cheerless misery ultra-marathon that’s as likely to leave you feeling defeated as it is to inspire awe.
Cox has cornered the market in dysfunctional dads after four seasons as the monstrous media mogul Logan Roy in Succession on TV. Here though he goes down-market and back in time as James Tyrone, a miserly former actor-manager in 1912, left with nothing in retirement but faded memories of former glories and the semi-comic conviction that his beloved Shakespeare was a good Irish Catholic.
His wife Mary (Patricia Clarkson, from The Station Agent and Good Night And Good Luck) is a wistful former convent school girl who has now become addicted to opium to treat her arthritis. And their two sons (Daryl McCormack from Bad Sister on Apple TV+ and rising star Laurie Kynaston) are dipsomaniac drifters - one with a taste for prostitutes, the other suffering from tuberculosis (or ‘consumption’ as it was then known).
Eugene O’Neill’s 1941 autobiographical American drama now starring Brian Cox as an actor-manager and patriarch of a dysfunctional family is sometimes hailed as one of the greatest plays of the 20th century
But at three-and-a-half hours it can also feel like a cheerless misery ultra-marathon that’s as likely to leave you feeling defeated as it is to inspire awe. Brian Cox pictured with co-star Patricia Clarkson
Cox has cornered the market in dysfunctional dads after four seasons as the monstrous media mogul Logan Roy in Succession on TV
Now aged 77, Cox remains a force to be reckoned with in a character that’s supposed to be 65. Not unlike Logan Roy, he is a roving volcano looking for an excuse to erupt. When he kicks off at his two boys for their lack of ambition, his eyeballs stand out on stalks a good yard in advance. And yet, unlike Roy, he has a softer, sentimental side, recalling how he wrecked his stage career by playing it safe, for money.
He also shows great tenderness and charm around Clarkson as his beloved Mary, a woman who married beneath her station. She has the most interesting role, haunted by the loss of a child and her past playing piano for admiring nuns at school, and stilling her occasional rage with wry humour. Yet even she proves ever more numinous.
Most of Cox’s fury is focused on the boys. It is met by McCormack’s shifty-eyed older brother Jamie with a combination of deference, avoidance and deceit. Kynaston’s younger brother Edmund – the O’Neillish role of the tortured writer – holds his own with Cox, meeting his father’s quotation of Shakespeare with the bleaker poetry of Baudelaire. Thank God, therefore, for touches of Irish humour from Derry Girls’ Louisa Harland as a subversive maid.
Nothing wrong with the acting then, but still Jeremy Herrin’s morose production left me feeling buried alive in Lizzie Clachan’s dour, coffin-like set of undecorated boards and costumes of greyed-out greens and beige. It’s as though all four characters have given up hope before the show has even started. Sitting down to guzzle endless volumes of whisky, it’s all jaw-jaw as they dig ever deeper pits.
So, as a distant fog horn calls them into the night, and mist rolls in off the Atlantic Ocean ‘like the ghost of the sea’, this is a pretty good approximation to purgatory - and not an experience I can in good conscience recommend to anyone.
Address of this article:http://caymanislands.camilleandconfettis.com/news-19f999973.html
Very good!(9)
Related articles
- Testimony at Sen. Bob Menendez's bribery trial focuses on his wife's New Jersey home
- LIV Golf star Kevin Na unleashes foul
- 1 dead, 2 injured in shooting on Navajo Nation in northern Arizona
- Billie Eilish announces return to Australia in 2025 for upcoming world tour
- Adela Cernousek of Texas A&M wins NCAA individual golf title for first collegiate win
- Trump hush money trial: Prosecutors zero in on details as testimony resumes
- Williams, Gilgeous
- Trump hush money trial: Prosecutors zero in on details as testimony resumes
- New York's high court upholds requiring insurance to cover medically necessary abortions
- China issues action plan on promoting digital commerce
Popular articles
Recommended
China sanctions former US lawmaker who supported Taiwan
I was single for six years because I'm too hot to date and men are 'scared off' by my good looks
Poland is still not ready to adopt the euro, its finance minister says
Samsung reports 10
Juneteenth proclaimed state holiday again in Alabama, after bill to make it permanent falters
Ashley Roberts shows off her incredible figure in a stylish Barbie
Asia's first cylindrical FPSO facility completed in E China
US to require automatic emergency braking on new vehicles
Links
- Coronel has 3 saves, first shutout of season, Red Bulls and Fire tie 0
- 7 shot dead in 2 locations in U.S. Illinois
- Agyemang rallies Charlotte to 3
- Israel's air
- Gaza protester, 28, says she'll murder lawmakers at public meeting
- 22 killed, 10 injured as tractor trolley overturns in India
- Logan Webb goes 7 strong innings and Thairo Estrada homers twice as Giants rout Rays 11
- Feature: Asian Americans pledge to fight discrimination, hate in U.S.
- India's Delhi, outskirts mandate Stage
- U.S. House Republicans fail to impeach homeland security secretary over border security