A Long Day’s Journey Into Galway
One of the greatest productions of a Eugene O’Neill play I’ve ever seen opened in Galway last night and the chances are that it will be coming to the West End fairly soon.
Garry Hynes’s revival for her Druid Theatre Company will no doubt storm the Dublin Theatre Festival in early October, and Marie Mullen’s performance as Mary Tyrone will be hailed there as the pinnacle achievement of her illustrious career.
Like Beckett, O’Neill is really an Irish writer. His play of old sorrow, “written in tears and blood,” as he said, portrays his own drug addict mother, his mean and moody actor father, his drunken elder brother and his own tormented self with terrifying candour. For most Irish Catholic families, there is nothing remarkable in this. I sometimes think that my own, for instance, makes O’Neill’s play look like a Ray Cooney farce.
But Hynes’s production rolls out like an insidious fog and envelops you in its wince-making atmosphere of constant suspicion, bitter recrimination and emotional cruelty as Mary drifts away from her menfolk on a memory-laced cloud of sweet powders.
The audience in the Galway Town Hall took it all like prescribed medecine and afforded the actors a standing ovation — at midnight. Yes, this is the Ken Dodd version of the play, coming in at dead on four-and-a-half hours with two intervals.
When Jonathan Miller directed Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey in the play, they went at it like an overlapping dialogue piece of Caryl Churchill and we were out on the street by ten o’clock. But the length and the torpor are all part of what the play is essentially about, so I’m afraid Hynes has done the better job.
The National Theatre version Michael Blakemore directed with Constance Cummings as Mary and Laurence Olivier as James, the old actor, was the previously best production. This one may eclipse it, and the balance is redressed in Mary’s favour. Her James at Druid is the alarmingly tall and beaky American film actor James Cromwell. He doesn’t get what Olivier got in the role, the faded glamour and leonine presence; at one point Olivier leapt like a panther onto the sitting room table to adjust the gaslights, whereas Cromwell merely extends a lazy arm and idly tinkers with the fittings. But Cromwell’s performance is one long sigh of resignation with little flashes of nastiness, and I think it may gather strength as it goes on.
Any excuse to go to Galway is a good one, of course. There was time for fish and chips in McDonagh’s, a pint in Hughes and a quick browse in Kennys gallery. Kennys bookshop, alas, is now solely on-line, but the exhibition of John Connery’s West of Ireland landscapes and county fairs was balm to the spirit on a wet Wednesday afternoon.