Eugene O'Neill's famously autobiographical play is full of references to "the old country", with the Tyrone family's Irish background a source of exaggerated pride or shame. By casting Irish and American actors, Druid's production acknowledges this formative hinterland, and Garry Hynes directs her excellent cast with a reverence that gives O'Neill's doom-laden romanticism full rein.
Written in 1941 and published posthumously, O'Neill's play re-creates his troubled childhood as the son of a famous actor and a morphine-addicted mother, both children of Irish immigrants. The play is set on a single day in 1912, and the four family members - former matinee idol James Tyrone, his wife Mary and their adult sons Jamie and Edmund - play out their grievances through endless repetition and reiteration. In a family obsessed with its own past, patterns recur: the consumption that killed Mary's father has re-emerged in Edmund, while alcoholism binds the generations. The daughter, wife and mother of drinkers, Mary laments their addiction while denying her own, just as her husband and sons despairingly watch her succumb to morphine, while downing glass after glass of whiskey.
The self-deceiving Mary is powerfully portrayed by Marie Mullen as a woman with the capacity to wound as much as she is wounded. While she has moments when she appears a fragile victim, this is merely one of many personas, suggesting that her husband is not the only actor in the family. James Cromwell brings restrained pathos to the father's story of childhood hardship, making this "stinky old miser" sympathetic. Histrionic tendencies in all the performances remind us that these are frustrated artists - unlike the playwright, who escaped, writing "in tears and blood" to shake off the enervating fatalism that weighs on this production.
· Until September 29. Box office: 0035391 568660. Then touring.
