A Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

An evening at the theatre in London.

I had been waiting a very long time to see Eugene O’Neill’s play, ‘A Long Day’s Journey Into Night’.

I wrote some weeks ago now about growing up and neither of my parents were academic. Although I remain grateful that my Mum encouraged me to read, I think she spotted I liked stories and she read, ‘The Famous Five’ to me every night. Enid Blyton, probably a horrible person and certainly a dreadful mother, but she had an imagination, and she knew how to capture a child.

This love of story kept my imagination alive through my chaotic and at times terrifying education. University was a sweet delight, a smorgasbord of wonder. I hope young people still have that experience.

After the first year at Kent, I changed my degree from straight English to English and Comparative Literature. The course on ‘Tragedy’ I took with Professor Shirley Barlow, a Classicist, was superb. I encountered the Greek Dramatists, Shakespeare (obviously) and then we moved onto modern playwrights like Goethe, Shiller, Moliere, Ibsen, and finally O’Neill.

I remembered the power of the works we read, ‘Mourning Becomes Electra’, ‘The Ice-Man Cometh’ and finally, ‘A Long Day’s Journey Into Night’. I read up on O’Neill, his alcoholism and his tortured family situation and his damaged soul. These were big plays and strong emotions were at play. He even created his own theatre that took its stature from a Greek Theatre, the actors dwarfed by the set. I like my art and literature to express transcendence, so O’Neill’s work does not naturally seem to express this, and yet…

A trip to the Wyndham’s Theatre in London is no small financial undertaking these days, the tickets I purchased cost me just over two hundred pounds, but I was tempted to part with my cash to see this play that had struck me with so much force so many years ago. It also featured the actor Brian Cox, after his big screen role in ‘Succession’. The rest of the cast featured a superb turn from Patricia Clarkson as Mary Tyrone, Daryl McCormack (Bad Sisters) as James Tyrone JR and Laurie Kynaston as the younger Tyrone sibling. My expectations were high.

This piece is not meant to be a theatre review per se and the plays the thing, so the best thing is to go and see it yourself. O’Neill himself found it a torture to write, a piece of deep therapy dealing with his family’s pain and alcoholism.  He did not want it performed until twenty-five years after his death, but this request was not honoured after his passing.

The characters who appear in the three hours on stage- the overbearing, domineering father, the warring and at times feckless siblings and the ‘mad’ mother have become modern tropes on stage, we watch this unravel through the course of one day, that long day’s journey into night. These people, we realise, were the playwright’s kith and kin. As Satre said, ‘Hell is other people!’ And yet…

Families are complex structures and society relies on strong families with that semi permeable membrane into wider society. Like all things families are a stick-with-two-ends, they can enable but also damage. I have seen this time and again in my professional career.

The characters in O’Neill’s play backup against each other, poke at each others wounds, be-little and spiral into alcoholism. The saddest character of all is the mother, a women trapped by events in the past and who can only regress into depression and madness.

If we are unlucky, we might see aspects of our own personal experiences with this onstage family at war with themselves. If our family has been a happy one, then we may experience empathy and compassion. All the characters seek meaning and ultimately love but they cannot find it in each other. There is something of the Greek tragedy about all O’Neill’s plays, an inevitability, a sense that, ‘who the gods destroy they first make mad’.

The modern play with its modern existential would view offers no transcendence, no turning inward, no connection to the divine as Shakespeare’s Comedies do. The doorway to the source has been slammed shut.

And yet, to live with consciousness is to own all the parts but not be owned by any of them, to choose with clarity and composure which ones to act from. To love fully — oneself, or another — is to accept all the parts and cherish the totality. This is the gift that drama can offer us, that holding up of a mirror to nature. Live theatre where emotions are felt is best.

I am preoccupied at present with thoughts of what I do next. All my learning has been to serve, where do I apply my thirty-two years in education for best benefit?

Certainly, young men in our society seem to be very lost, the old mythical pattern of the ‘Hero’s Journey’ seems not to apply, some new vision is needed, a vison that will come from the margins and not the centre ground which is dry and ossified.

The male spirit still finds more succour in sports but this also has its negative sides. I see at school the pressure gifted young footballers are under who play at a junior level for professional clubs. They love the game, but the clubs view them as potential economic units, the joy sucked from something they love as they are so often discarded as ‘not good enough’.

‘Not good enough’ how that phrase will haunt their future. We must offer better alternatives.

I will finish this week with the words of DH Lawrence, which he wrote while dying of tuberculosis at the age of 42:

The vast marvel is to be alive… The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul… There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

Here’s the audio.

Yours sincerely,

David