By John McCallum
The Australian
July 5, 2010

"WRITTEN in tears and blood", as playwright Eugene O'Neill put it, Long Day's Journey Into Night is his painful coming-to-terms with his past and his damaged family, and one of his greatest plays. But it is not often done in this country, perhaps because it is long and difficult to play, or perhaps because producers are nervous about its box-office appeal. Certainly it needs great actors with experience, skill and power to play the heightened, almost melodramatic, excess of it.

It has them here not only in its two stars - William Hurt and Robyn Nevin - as the haunted James and Mary Tyrone but also in its co-stars, Todd Van Voris and Luke Mullins as their tormented sons, and Emily Russell as the maid Cathleen. This is a stunning, absorbing production, full of emotional complexity.

The play charts the journey through one long day as the Tyrones come together in their summer retreat and dredge up their past, trying to find a way of going on.

James is a popularly successful actor. His wife, Mary, is a supposedly recovering morphine addict. Of their sons, Jamie (Van Voris) is an alcoholic no-hoper and Edmund (Mullins) a troubled poet in the early stages of consumption (tuberculosis). And they have a past full of anguish and guilt. It's not a recipe for a happy family reunion.

The production is directed with great sensitivity to the play's rhythms and nuances by Andrew Upton, on a terrific expressionist set by Michael Scott-Mitchell. It is a play in which the characters keep grandstanding in front of each other, playing out their grievances and their passions in an exaggerated way, and then continually and abruptly feeling remorse.

And so we have, in Scott-Mitchell's design, a vast open stage with the walls, lights and rehearsal chairs visible at the sides, A huge red false proscenium towers in the middle of it, framing this series of encounters and confrontations. But then, as the characters creep offstage to nurse their inner pain, we see them sitting in the chairs, hunched over privately. When Edmund flees one terrible scene, he rushes out through the auditorium.

Behind the proscenium are two enormous architectural pieces tilting and looming oppressively over the playing space, creating the room. Behind that is a wall with windows through which we dimly see the supposedly happy family dining room. It is from here that Mary disappears upstairs to brood and take her drugs.

But always they keep coming back on to this symbolic red-lined stage, to play out their long day's journey, into night and, perhaps, some sort of redemption.

Nevin gives the performance of her career. (I've said this before about other roles, including her magnificent Hecuba in Barry Koskie's production of Women of Troy. She just keeps getting better and better.)

Her Mary is utterly fascinating to watch and listen to: feverish and twitchy at the beginning and then growing calmer and younger as the morphine takes over and she moves forward, with an almost unbearable poignancy, towards her past.

Hurt is wonderful, too. His James Tyrone is also twitchy at the beginning, and like Nevin's Mary he settles down, more wearily, towards the end, the drug in his case being alcohol. Hurt plays him stitched-up and defensive but highly vulnerable, for all his bluster. His great sad love for Mary is always clear, lurking beneath his stern rebukes and moments of dismissiveness. Old ham that he is, he keeps embarking on theatrical gestures as he hectors his sons and tries to settle his wife, but the gestures keep faltering, as he comes to realise that grandstanding is not enough, and never has been.

Van Voris and Mullins play the complex relationship between the two damaged young sons with extraordinary sensitivity. Van Voris's Jamie, rotund and strutting self-confidently at first, has degenerated into an alcoholic wreck by the time he returns at the end from the bars and whorehouses to which he has tried to escape. In a powerful long scene he drunkenly reveals something of his scary true nature. But here too, as well as the hate and selfishness, we can see the love underneath, a love that he has been so assiduously trying to drown in whisky for so long.

The other son, Edmund, is the O'Neill character and, like Horatio, he spends a lot of the play observing with a mixture of horror and sadness the train wreck that this family has become. But this is his family, and he suffers terribly watching their bright day progress into night.

Mullins is superb throughout, but especially in the great scene in Act 4 in which he tries to speak to his distant father about the poetic passion and the melancholy that consume him. There is a kind of meta-theatrical thrill in the thought he survived all this and went on to write this great play.

O'Neill said he wrote the play not only in tears and blood but "with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness". We get all that in this very fine and cathartic production. Requiescat in pace, all the haunted Tyrones.