Long Day’s Journey review: An intriguingly enigmatic take on a forbiddingly venerable classic

Long Day’s Journey

Project Arts Centre, Dublin★★★★☆

Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is, as its title suggests, a theatrical mammoth. (It typically runs for about three and a half hours.) This new version, created by Emma Coen and Gavin Quinn at Project Arts Centre, clocks in at a mere 70 minutes. The title itself has been trimmed to Long Day’s Journey.

But it’s not an abridgement so much as a woozy sci-fi riff on O’Neill’s searing family drama, incorporating an eclectic soundtrack as well as a chunk of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The production’s quirky designs are signalled as soon as the (very bright) lights go up on four performers standing inside futuristic pods. Dressed in identical dark-blue jeans and jackets, they then slowly move downstage accompanied by crashing rock music.

We hear a few coughs from Faith Jones, which indicates that she plays the Tyrone family’s consumption-ridden youngest son, Edmund. But there is little other discernible connection to O’Neill’s autobiographical story about disillusionment and addiction in pre-first World War Connecticut.

Not a word is spoken until about 10 minutes in, when we hear Ingrid Craigie’s recorded voiceover reading out O’Neill’s hyperdetailed stage directions. An amusing excursion follows on the many deaths in Macbeth, as we continue to remain at some remove from the production’s source material.

The primary focus ultimately settles on the lopsided relationship between Edmund and his father, James Tyrone snr, a once-promising actor who sacrificed his talent for the easy money brought by repeatedly performing the same lightweight play.

Paul Lazar brings out the character’s weary regrets and self-absorption, as well as his condescension towards Edmund. We get little sense, however, of the extraordinary miserliness that sees him prod his ailing son towards a cut-price sanatorium in O’Neill’s play.

Though several decades older than the part, Andrew Bennett ostensibly plays the dissipated elder brother, James Tyrone jnr. But that character becomes a background presence here, and Bennett’s main contribution is an extended speech adapted from the Ghost’s appeal to avenge “murder most foul” in Hamlet.

[ Paul Lazar on Long Day’s Journey: ‘You say a line and you think the entire play is in that line, and in the next line’Opens in new window ]

Adding to the haunted atmosphere is Craigie’s voiceover as the guilt-ridden, morphine-addled mother, Mary, who seems to be speaking from beyond the grave.

The on-stage cast is completed by Lazar’s wife, Annie-B Parson, who says nothing but proves an oddly captivating presence as she drifts around the stage wearing an unchangingly inscrutable expression. (Long Day’s Journey is produced by Pan Pan in association with Big Dance Theatre, Parson and Lazar’s New York-based company.)

The stylised setting evokes an isolated, dystopian existence in the distant future. O’Neill’s Tyrones may be in the grip of spiritual collapse, but they are also full of combustible energy. Here, by contrast, the family seem to be playing out a simulacrum of life sustained only by fragmented memories. They have perhaps reached the night at the journey’s end.

Under Quinn’s direction, the deadened pacing and tone could do with a bit more zip in places. He and Coen have nonetheless crafted an intriguingly enigmatic take on a forbiddingly venerable classic.

Long Day’s Journey is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, until Saturday, November 21st