Time works wonders. When Richard Eyre’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece opened at the Bristol Old Vic two years ago, it felt a bit raw and rushed. Now, with Jeremy Irons and Lesley Manville still heading the cast, it has added a quarter of an hour to the running time and acquired a rhythm that allows us to feel that we are living, like the Tyrone family, through a day and a night of alternating hope and despair.
What never ceases to astonish – and this comes out clearly in Eyre’s production – is the dizzying emotional contradiction of O’Neill’s characters. Within a tight classical structure, they bounce around like pinballs between reality and illusion.
One minute James Tyrone (Irons), the tightwad actor who has made a fortune from touring a piece of sentimental hokum, is consigning his consumptive son, Edmund, to a cheap state sanatorium, the next he is saying money is no object, “within reason”. That capacity to execute emotional U-turns defines the play. The morphine-addicted Mary (Manville) harks back dreamily to her first, life-changing, romantic encounter with James and instantly dismisses herself as a sentimental fool. The couple’s elder son, Jamie, likewise veers between belittling the literary efforts of his brother Edmund and praising his poetic gift.
O’Neill presents us with a vertiginous world in which any statement may be cancelled a second later. One of the play’s few fixed points is James’s horror at Mary’s relapse, after two clean months, into her old drug-taking habit, and Irons charts excellently a dismay that is born out of true love. Initially James is all joshing breeziness as he cuddles Mary and hymns her newfound weight. There is, however, a chilling moment when he realises his wife is back on the hard stuff and he stares at her with a look that blends accusation and remorse.
Irons, much more secure in the role than he was in Bristol, captures well the actorly side of James’s personality, such as the sonorous delight he takes in reciting Shakespeare. The key to a fine performance, however, lies in his powerlessness to reach out to a woman he still passionately adores.
Manville has added grace notes to an already strong performance. She conveys the compulsive articulacy of the morphine addict. More than any actor I recall, she also brings out Mary’s painful iteration of the word “home”, as if yearning for some element of constancy in a restless nomadic existence. “Home” is also a word with religious overtones and Manville poignantly suggests Mary is haunted by the memory of her lost faith, at one point hurling herself to the ground as if seeking absolution.
Rory Keenan as Jamie and Matthew Beard as Edmund are new to the cast and successfully embody the former’s rasping self-loathing and the latter’s doomy romanticism. Jessica Regan as the family’s Irish maid also reminds us that there is comedy in O’Neill: no sooner has Regan’s Cathleen assured Mary that her husband worships the ground she walks on, than she continues, almost without pause, “Speaking of acting …” It’s a welcome touch of light relief in a play that if well done, as it is here, leaves you emotionally pulverised by the feeling that O’Neill, in providing an unsparing portrait of his family, is seeking their posthumous forgiveness.
- At Wyndham’s, London, until 7 April. Box office: 0844 482 5120.
