The Emmy, Golden Globe and Olivier award-winning actor Brian Cox, makes his return to the London stage in Spring 2024 starring in Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
Often regarded as the greatest American play of the 20th Century, this landmark new production will be helmed by award-winning director Jeremy Herrin.
O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play depicts a summer day in the life of the Tyrones, closely based on O’Neill’s own chaotically dysfunctional family. Deeply moving and uplifting in equal measure, it’s a compelling story of love, hate, betrayal and addiction and the impossible fragility of family bonds.
Following his recent acclaimed production of Best of Enemies, Jeremy Herrin’s new production will bring into sharp focus the universality of Eugene O’Neill’s beautifully crafted characters and language, to create an unmissable theatrical event.
__Access Performances__
Captioned Performance - Tuesday 7th May 2024
Audio Described Performance - Tuesday 14th May 2024
While Cox’s performance is undeniably strong, he is often outshone by Patricia Clarkson’s Mary, who veers between drug-induced serenity and a frantic energy, her sentences running into each other as reflections on the past and present thoughts collide. One moment, she is doting and anxious about Edmund’s health, and the next, she is abrasive and cruel in her observations. Clarkson perfectly captures a desperate picture of addiction, her mind clouded like the fog that surrounds their seaside home, which is signalled by sound designer Tom Gibbons’s unsettling foghorn that rings out even during the interval.
Cox, all bark and ferocity, plays up the character’s fury, his sense of betrayal, his anger at the world and himself. In short, punchy outbursts of speech, he is cruelly dismissive of James, and you almost feel McCormack flinch beneath his verbal blows. Even more shockingly, he is prepared to skimp on the care of the delicate Edmund, whose diagnosis with consumption provides the play’s main narrative thread. Yet in the long final conversation between them, Cox also reveals James’s fear of poverty, and Kynaston’s wonderfully intense and frightened Edmund listens as if understanding his father for the first time.
2024 | West End |
West End |
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