Jeremy Irons plays the role with an almost patrician hauteur that’s subtly effective despite its departure from O’Neill’s description of the character as, basically, an Irish peasant.Īlso Read: 'The Seagull' Film Review: All-Star Cast Flourishes in Chekhov Adaptation Where Lange brought a plus-size languor to Mary Tyrone, the morphine-addicted woman modeled on O’Neill’s own mother, Manville is an almost combustible dervish of energy who careens among the men in her life in the seaside Connecticut home where the play is set.Ĭhief among them is her husband, a once-great actor who has settled for popular melodramas and the comfort of his tight-fisted ways. (The revival, which originated at the U.K.’s Bristol Old Vic in 2016, comes to L.A.’s The Wallis next month.) Just two years after Jessica Lange won a Tony for a Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s epic tragedy “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” the British actress Lesley Manville brings a strikingly different approach to the woman at its center in Richard Eyre’s compelling but flawed new production, which opened Sunday at Brooklyn Academy of Music.
