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

详细摘要

At Project in Dublin, Pan Pan and Big Dance Theatre create a woozy sci-fi riff on Eugene O’Neill’s searing family drama ...

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.

[ Paul Lazar on Long Day’s Journey: ‘You say a…

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