Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a titanic piece of writing (and a production that is now even longer than it was in Bristol) but when it is of this quality, it really doesn’t matter.
‘Exhausting & strangely invigorating’: LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT – West End ★★★★★
Lesley Manville, whose wrenching, delicately controlled pain scorched through Richard Eyre’s unforgettable production of Ibsen’s Ghosts a while back, now shines in an extraordinary performance under the same director in A Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
‘An intensely intimate portrait of a family’: LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT – West End ★★★★
Long Day’s Journey Into Night at London’s Wyndham’s Theatre is a powerful and moving production, but would be even more compelling with about an hour taken out of it.
‘Lovingly created’: LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT – West End
The Bristol Old Vic’s production of Long Day’s Journey into Night at Wyndham’s wrings excellent performances from its leads and brings clarity to O’Neill’s huge canvas.
NEWS: Dates confirmed for Jeremy Irons & Lesley Manville’s Long Day, TICKETS ONSALE
Jeremy Irons and Lesley Manville reprise their roles in Richard Eyre’s acclaimed production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night for a limited ten-week West End season in the new year. TICKETS ARE NOW ON SALE VIA MYTHEATREMATES.
FROM DOWN UNDER: Desire Under the Elms
Eugene O’Neill’s poetically titled 1924 tragedy Desire Under the Elms retains an alluring and potentially affecting premise. While The Sol III Company’s new production contains many admirable elements, the scope of the play is stifled by the intimacy of the performing space.
News and reviews from New York: Broadway box office makes history and my top shows this spring
Broadway breaks all previous records for a single week, and I choose the half dozen shows I am most looking forward to this spring in New York.
THE HAIRY APE – Old Vic
Classic. Expressionist. Socialist. Eugene O’Neill. You could add to that depressing list ‘directed by Richard Jones’, the man who sucked all the life out of Annie Get Your Gun across the road at the Young Vic by staging it as seen through a letter box.
Quote Unquote #1: 15 of my favourite lines from 6 recent plays
I’m not making notes for reviews: it’s the quotes I want. I can’t help it, I’m a quote fiend. As it happens, I also find the plays that have me scribbling fastest are the ones that I feel compelled to recommend most enthusiastically. Quotes in this instalment are from: Rotterdam, Lovesong of the Electric Bear, The Hairy Ape, Dinner With Friends, Harlequinade and Mr Foote’s Other Leg.
Weekly Theatre Podcast: The Winter’s Tale, The Hairy Ape, A Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes
This week the London theatre bloggers discuss The Winter’s Tale, starring Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench and opening the year-long Branagh Theatre West End season, The Hairy Ape starring Bertie Carvel at the Old Vic, A Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes at the Tricycle and, now finished at Soho Theatre, Joanne.
THE HAIRY APE – West End
From the opening moments of Richard Jones’ stunning, nightmarish production of Eugene O’Neill’s early play we have both the shock of expressionist newness – it can still disconcert, a century on – and a powerful sense of period. Both are profoundly right.
My theatre diary: ‘New’ plays The First Man, Ticking, Teddy Ferrara, Eventide
The new play’s the thing, even when it’s very old…. Here are four I’ve seen over the past few weeks, three of which I haven’t managed to squeeze yet into separate blogs, but that I’d nevertheless recommend: The First Man, Ticking, Teddy Ferrara and, now touring, Eventide.
THE FIRST MAN – Jermyn Street Theatre
Well, God bless the little Jermyn. Director and AD Antony Biggs, an unwearying ferret of lost drama, has dug up another barnstorming early 20c number: a UK premiere, no less, from lEugene O’Neill. The author, it seems, didn’t much rate it in 1922, and went on to success with more famous The Hairy Ape (about to run at the Old Vic). But on this smaller stage, with an impressive cast of 12 , the forgotten work flares into savage, passionate life.
THE EMPEROR JONES – Lost Theatre
Whilst visiting a Caribbean island about 100 years ago, Brutus Jones, an African American train driver, some how ends up emperor of the island’s native tribe. His reign is brutal, so Jones knows it will eventually end. Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 The Emperor Jones begins with Jones’ initially relaxed attempt at escape from the uprising citizens, and inevitable guilty descent into the madness of a Shakespearian villain. The script is entirely spoken by Jones, barring the first and last scenes, with his madness peppered with ghosts that won’t let him rest in the darkness of the island’s woods.
NEWS: Michael Grandage directs Forest Whitaker in Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie on Broadway in 2016
Academy Award® winner, Golden Globe Award® winner and BAFTA winner Forest Whitaker will make his highly anticipated Broadway debut in HUGHIE, by fourtime Pulitzer Prize winner and Nobel Prize Laureate Eugene O’Neill. Directed by Tony Award® winner and Olivier Award® winner [and former Donmar Warehouse artistic director] Michael Grandage, HUGHIE will play a strictly limited engagement in the spring of …
NEWS: Bertie Carvel stars in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape at Old Vic
Bertie Carvel is to lead the cast in Richard Jones’ new production of The Hairy Ape at The Old Vic. The second production in Matthew Warchus’ tenure as Artistic Director, The Hairy Ape opens on 29 October 2015, with previews from 17 October and will see The Old Vic theatre transform back to its original proscenium arch layout.
DEATH OF A SALESMAN – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Dear RSC: I’d like to return this Death of a Salesman. It just doesn’t fit. Apart from its unravelling from not being a Shakespeare play in your theatres over the 23 April ‘birthday weekend’ for the first time, the ‘perfect match’ between Willy Loman and tragic heroes like Coriolanus or Lear wasn’t knit together any […]
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Diary of a theatre addict: Scott Alan, Alison Jiear, Carrie and more
I feel like I’ve been at the St James Theatre and Studio all week — I went to three consecutive nights of Scott Alan performing his own work from last Sunday to Tuesday (joined by a host of guests in his first night in the main house, then just Cynthia Erivo and one more guest a night on each of the other more intimate gigs in the downstairs Studio), then also saw Paul Baker on Friday and tonight I’m seeing Jamie Parker. All that, and Alison Jiear on Britain’s Got Talent, last night too — what a week it has been for cabaret.
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AH, WILDERNESS! Young Vic, SE1
THE SANDS OF TIME YIELD UP THEIR DREAMS This is Eugene O’Neill’s only comedy: the moment when from his vortex of family addiction, illness, loneliness, romantic seaward longings and deep human empathy came a spurt of hope. It is set … Continue reading →