Long Day's Journey Into Night

Long Day's Journey Into Night photos

Long Day's Journey Into Night description

Brian Cox is making his return to the London stage, starring in Eugene O’Neill’s classic family drama Long Day’s Journey Into Night. This is powerful stuff with a West End cast to match, an exploration of a dysfunctional, chaotic family trying to come to terms with itself.

If you’d love to catch the star of HBO’s Succession, Brian Cox, on stage in a play so good it’s just as popular 70 years after it premiered, this one’s for you.

Where an award-winning cast meets award-winning drama

The Emmy, Golden Globe and Olivier award-winning actor is directed by Jeremy Herrin in a cast including Golden Globe and Emmy winner Patricia Clarkson of Sharp Objects and House of Cards, who plays Mary Tyrone. BAFTA nominee Daryl McCormack (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande) plays James junior, Louisa Harland (Derry Girls, Ulster American) is Cathleen and Laurie Kynaston (Spring Awakening, Bare, The Son, Fool Me Once) plays Edmund Tyrone.

This is Cox’s first appearance on stage for nearly a decade. Laurie Kynaston is the third actor to take the role of Edmund, replacing the original Alex Lawther, who himself was replaced by Anthony Boyle. Kynaston made his West End debut in The Ferryman, starred in the Spring Awakening revival at the Almeida during 2021, and starred alongside Jordan Luke Gage in the one-night-only Bare: The Musical at the London Palladium.

Creative-wise we have Lizzie Clachan as the designer, Jack Knowles as lighting designer, Tom Gibbons as sound designer, Polly Bennett as movement director, and Jessica Ronane cast the show. The associate director is Justina Kehinde.

Written during the Second World War, just as relevant today

Written between 1939 and 1941, the play was staged for the first time in 1956 after the playwright’s death. It went on to thrill Broadway and win the Tony Award for Best Play the same year. O'Neill received the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Drama posthumously for his masterpiece, now widely regarded as his finest work and one of the greatest American plays of the 1900s. Inspired by the playwright’s family, the emotions feel unusually raw.

The action is set in the holiday home of the Tyrone family during summer 1912. Mary has only come back to her family recently after morphine addiction treatment. In fact, she’s still addicted. Edmund is coughing violently and they think he might have caught TB. As the family tries to cope with these problems they revisit old arguments and open old wounds they’ve never managed to forget.

Playing at Wyndham's Theatre (venue info)

Performance Times for Long Day's Journey Into Night