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"Long Day's Journey Into Night" at the Apollo
Published on 3rd September 2013
Eugene O’Neill’s quasi-autobiographical snapshot of the breakdown of a family is aptly named – four acts, four protagonists, and with runtimes known to stretch up to four hours, it's challenging stuff. With a morphine-addicted mother, a bitterly regretful father, and sons with alcohol addictions, consumption, or both, it’s far from easy to keep the initiative and stop relentlessness from creeping in. In this production, though, director Howard Davies’ master-stroke is resisting the temptation to indulge in heavy, pregnant pauses, bravely deciding to inject the piece with an electric dramatic energy, filling Lez Brotherston’s beautiful design with taut unease. Quick-fire hemistichomythia means that angry, anguished lines are swallowed up by small-talk that plasters over the cracks before they have a chance to be revealed, creating tension as thick as the fog that draws in outside. As the day wears on, the whisky bottle that takes centre stage is emptied and replaced again and again, and mother Mary (Laurie Metcalfe) mysteriously withdraws into her room more and more frequently. Metcalfe refuses to glamorise Mary, baring the brutal impact of drug addiction like an open wound. Her hands, withered and twisted, clench the arms of a wicker chair as she fights a constant battle with herself – think Blanche Dubois, but thirty years on. The comparisons with Tennessee Williams don’t end there – big, strident images of the sort that characterise the American stage abound. David Suchet as the regret-tortured father reaches up to turn off lights on a chandelier one by one, Mary appears at the back of the stage, hair dishevelled, clutching her wedding dress - it is not a production that shies away from drama. Trevor White as son Jamie simmers throughout - a proto-Jimmy Porter with an Americana twist, his bitter catechisms on everything from his drinking habit to his exploits with “fat Violet” the prostitute smoulder with trapped energy and wasted ambition. O’Neill’s alter-ego Edmund is played with admirable commitment by Kyle Soller, who takes on 40 minute long dialogues with considerable gusto, his body heaving in the throes of Tuberculosis, but his eyes glimmering with romantic yearning as he describes his time in the navy, struggling to come to terms with the idea that he will never travel the world again. It is Suchet, though, that is the most magnetic of all, his gloriously resonant voice that slips into Shakespearean quotation with ease only revealing his personal tragedy as an actor who sold out. When Mary claims that “the past is the present”, it is a line that applies to all the characters – our long journey is not just into night, but into the murky pasts of their lives.
