My partner Noor and I arrived at The Empty Space, Salford, to find a foyer buzzing with anticipation. Around us, conversations turned on the legacy of the play itself, a sure sign that Elysium Theatre Company had drawn an audience who knew what they were about to witness. Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece has that effect on people; it precedes itself.
Set, design, and costumes
The set that greeted us was simple and purposeful. Every choice felt deliberate and grounded in character, the quality of the furnishings and the palette of colour speaking quietly but clearly to the defining characteristic of James Tyrone: his legendary tightfistedness. Particularly striking were three opaque lamps, their muted light suggesting at once the three older members of the Tyrone family and, perhaps, the glimmer of hope that Edmund had once represented for their future, now dimmed almost to nothing. Within that simplicity there was a real intelligence to the spatial arrangement, allowing the cast to move and interact with both the set and each other with an ease that served the naturalistic demands of the piece well.
The lighting matched this approach, understated and functional, with occasional breaks into a cold blue moonlight that caught both the late hour and the pervading melancholy of the Tyrone household beautifully. The sound design, while effective in purpose, occasionally misjudged its register; at moments when quiet domestic life was supposed to be unfolding elsewhere in the house, it felt a touch too present and loud, momentarily pulling focus from the stage.
The costumes were a particular pleasure. James Tyrone’s baggy suit looked as though it had been on his back for the better part of four decades, a marvellous, wordless piece of storytelling. Mary’s reserved dress and the sons’ trimmer, more modern cuts completed a picture of a family caught between different eras and different hungers.
The cast
Edmund Dehn brought a commanding gravitas to James Tyrone, anchoring the production with authority. His tenderness towards Mary felt genuine, believable right across the footlights, and his portrayal of a man simultaneously generous in feeling and mean in spirit was well-judged. There were occasional line fumbles that briefly interrupted the flow, but these were minor blemishes on an otherwise assured performance.
The evening’s most remarkable achievement, given the circumstances, was Joyce Branagh’s Mary Tyrone. Stepping into the role with script in hand following a late cast change, Branagh delivered a performance of remarkable absorption. Time and again I found myself forgetting entirely that she held the book, so naturally did she inhabit Mary’s disintegrating world and engage with her sons. It was a quiet act of theatrical courage.
Those sons were splendidly served. Daniel Bradford’s Edmund carried the weight of his character’s dour despair with conviction, but it was Danny Solomon’s Jamie who threatened to run away with the evening entirely. His drunken antics were perfectly calibrated: funny, painful and deeply human, providing an ideal counterpoint to Edmund’s inward suffering. The two together were the beating, broken heart of the production.
The play’s themes endure with uncomfortable clarity. The Tyrone family’s toxic, cyclical enabling, each member both victim and perpetrator in their own way, speaks as plainly to a contemporary audience as it ever did. O’Neill’s compassion for these damaged people, his refusal to assign simple blame, is what elevates the work beyond its biographical origins into something universal.
The audience were with the production throughout, laughing warmly at the play’s early dark humour and falling into hush at its moments of raw emotion. It must be said, however, that O’Neill’s play is a demanding proposition: four acts covering a single day that feels, by the end, like an entire lifetime. The Empty Space’s unforgiving chairs did little to ease that marathon quality, and there were moments in the later acts where the production’s pacing might have benefited from a slightly tighter hand. This is something of an occupational hazard with O’Neill, though; the relentlessness is, in many ways, the point. These are people from whom there is no escape, least of all themselves.
The image I carried home was of Jamie Tyrone staring with a penetrating, hollow intensity into the middle distance, turning over his mother’s addiction in the silence between words. It is the kind of moment that stays. Elysium Theatre Company, under Jake Murray’s direction, have delivered a Long Day’s Journey very much worth taking.
Wednesday 27 May 7pm – Washington Arts Centre Sunderland – Long Day’s Journey Into Night | Sunderland Culture – NORTHERN PREMIERE
Thursday 28 May 7pm – Theatre 41, York – Theatre@41 Monkgate | Public
Friday 29 May 7.30pm – Dukes, Lancaster – Long Day’s Journey Into Night › The Dukes
Saturday 30 May 7.30pm – Dukes, Lancaster – Long Day’s Journey Into Night › The Dukes
