Torture in the stalls

It’s considered the great masterpiece of 20th-century American drama. Oh, come off it. Long Day’s Journey into Night is a waffle-festival that descends into a torture session. Who would choose to spend time with the Tyrone family? Dad is a skinflint millionaire. Mum is a wittering smack addict. They’ve produced two layabout sons. One is a dipsomaniac with a moustache; the other has TB and a cough. These doomed narcissists chase each other around the family mansion in a spiral of vicious, self-regarding gossip. It’s like being trapped in a broken cable-car with four prattling drunks who hate each other. And I’m not convinced they drink that much. A bottle and a half of whisky, or a little over, is consumed in the course of a day. Which translates into seven glasses of wine between four adults. That’s not addiction. That’s a boozy afternoon.

Each of the Tyrones has just two modes of expression: boasting about themselves or carping about the other Tyrones. At least I gleaned one insight from these hyperactive gasbags: the definition of a bore is someone who values his past more than your present. That’s not a line from the play, just a random observation from your yawn-stifler in the stalls.

The central role of James, the patriarch, is attempted by Jeremy Irons who unfortunately can’t do accents. ‘Constitution’ begins in New England and ends in the Home Counties. He finds the ‘r’ in ‘Mary’ and in ‘deliberately’, but not in ‘more’ or ‘Ireland’. He gives the wrong vowel width to ‘was’, ‘that’, ‘on’ and ‘month.’ He doesn’t even try to Americanise ‘thought’ but swipes at it hard, rhyming it with ‘sport’, and ending on an explosive ‘t’, heavily aspirated. He sounds like the Duke of Edinburgh doing a bad impersonation of Wallis Simpson.