One of the World's Greatest Plays is Touring the North
Award-winning Durham-based theatre company Elysium is marking the 70th anniversary of Eugene O'Neill's seminal autobiographical masterpiece Long Day's Journey Into Night by making history with a three-week tour of northern venues
Jake Murray has been a theatre director all his adult life and has directed more than 100 shows up and down the country, from new plays to classics. ‘But there’s no doubt that I am happiest running my own company,’ he says. ‘Although it's a slog it gives me the freedom to direct the shows I want the way I want with the actors and creatives I want. That makes it worth it.’
His dad one of the co-founders and artistic directors of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester and his mum was his chief designer. ‘I grew up with theatre everywhere,’ he says. ‘Plays and whatever show they were working on would be discussed at the kitchen table. I’d be dropped off after school at the Royal Exchange as a little boy and wait in either the Green Room or wardrobe department to be picked up and taken home by one of my parents. Actors were always coming for dinner – Brian Cox, David Threlfall, Frances Barber, Gabrielle Drake – and we would regularly go and see the shows on at the theatre.
‘My brother and I grew up reading the greats of the world theatre: Shakespeare, Beckett, Chekhov, Ibsen, Brecht, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and so on. To us this was normal. It wasn’t until we got out into the big wide world that we discovered that it wasn’t. What it gave us was an encyclopaedic knowledge of the vast reservoir of plays out there available to us and a deep and abiding passion for the theatre and the magic it could create. For that I am incredibly grateful. Great theatre gives you a psychological and emotional kick that very little else does, so working in it is a life sustaining honour. It’s that special kick that I try and create in my work. Good theatre should touch you in ways that are unforgettable, whether it’s comic or tragic. Elysium’s mission is to make that happen every time.’
Jake co-founded Elysium in 2017 having just moved to Durham. The company started off small, producing the Manchester and Durham premiere of Days Of Wine And Roses, and their productions have grown over the course of almost 10 years. ‘We’ve produced everything from Ibsen, Strindberg and Beckett to regional premieres/first revivals of plays like Jez Butterworth’s The River, new plays and, most recently, Shakespeare,’ says Jake. ‘Our last two shows, the world premiere of The Moth by Paul Herzberg, and our 2024 tour of Othello by Shakespeare, sold out across 23 and 19 venues respectively, playing in Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, York and Lancaster, as well as all over the North East. The Moth transfers to London this November and we have big plans for our 10th anniversary.
‘Although we’ve performed in some of the best theatres in the North – the Lowry, HOME, Live, Shakespeare North – we’re very committed to bringing theatre to communities that wouldn’t normally see it. We do a lot of grassroots work in rural communities for instance and one of the best performances of The Moth was at East Stanley Working Men’s Club.’
Long Day’s Journey Into Night is arguably Elysium’s most ambitious show yet. ‘Although it’s universally hailed as one of the greatest plays ever written and regularly seen on Broadway and London’s West End, the vast majority of venues that will be hosting our tours will see it performed in those cities and towns of the first time,’ explains Jake. ‘As such we will be making theatre history in places like Alnwick, Hexham, Sunderland, Washington, Durham and Hartlepool. It’s incredibly rare for a company like ours to get the rights to the show and tour it as we are. It will, quite literally, be a once-in-a-life chance for a whole generation of theatre goers to see this great play.’
Long Day’s Journey Into Night is an autobiographical play about the author, Eugene O’Neill’s family. ‘Set in 1912, it presents himself, his older brother and his parents as they gather in their family home, Monte Cristo House, in New England,’ says Jake. ‘The family are fictionalised as the Tyrones, but everything in the play is a reflection of his own experience. His father was an incredibly famous actor who made his name playing the Count of Monte Cristo. It was, however, a troubled family. The mother was a morphine addict. She’d been given it during the difficult birth of O’Neill and became dependent on it to deal with the pain, not just the physical pain but the unacknowledged psychological and emotional pain she had been suffering from for years. Her addiction blew a hole in the family.’
The play follows the Tyrones over 24 hours, starting with breakfast and ending at three o’clock in the morning, as Mary slides back into the addiction and the three men try to cope. ‘It sounds depressing but in fact it’s an incredibly moving, funny, engrossing drama about the depth of feeling in families,’ Jake says. ‘You get caught up in all four Tyrones, you fall in love with them, you feel for them, you laugh with them and you cry with them. Most of all you see yourself and your own family in them. Although the play is in many ways a personal exorcism for O’Neill, he writes about himself and all three of his family members with such love, sympathy and compassion that you marvel at his generosity and understanding. Somehow by writing about his own family he manages to write about everyone’s.
‘The fascinating aspect of the play is that, although it’s his masterpiece, he didn’t write it to be performed. He completed it in 1941, more than a decade before his death in 1953, but saw it as a special piece of work to be kept secret between only his wife and himself. He felt it was too personal, too intimate to be released in his lifetime and gave instructions that it should only be published 25 years after his death, and then only to be read, not to be performed. His wife, Carlotta Monterey, who was quite a character, ignored his wishes. She not only released it for publication but allowed it to be performed at a theatre in Sweden, the one theatre O’Neill respected enough to produce his work (he was notoriously hard to please and hated almost every production of his plays). It premiered there in 1956 and was almost instantaneously hailed not only as his masterpiece but as one of the finest American plays ever written.’
Jake argues that, like all great plays, Long Day’s Journey is timeless. He first read the play in his teens and it made an impression on him. ‘In many ways it’s a yardstick of what theatre can be and I always recommend it to writers who are just starting out writing for the theatre and want something to use as an example of what you can do and say on a stage,’ he says. ‘Because of the status and fame of the play the rights are usually not available. They are usually snapped up by commercial production companies who hold onto it as a star vehicle to appear in the West End. In my own lifetime we’ve had Timothy West, Charles Dance, Jeremy Irons, David Suchet and most recently Brian Cox play Tyrone Snr for instance. It's incredibly rare for a regional theatre to get hold of it and almost unheard of for a company like Elysium to do so.
‘It so happens that it’s also one of the favourite plays of my lead actor and co-founder of Elysium, Danny Solomon, who has wanted to play Jamie Tyrone for years. Every year I would check the rights to see if they were free and they were always tied up. Then, suddenly, hey presto, they were free for 2026! We have Brian Cox to thank for that. The success of his recent production put the play to bed commercially for the duration.
‘After 30 years of working in the theatre up and down the country the Northern audience is the one I like the best. Especially with our work in the North East we have found that people respond to work which is authentic, which they feel tells them the truth and helps them engage with the biggest questions of life. That’s what this production will cater for. It’s our honour to be bringing this play to communities which will never have had a chance to see it before. The last time it was in the North East was 1991 when Timothy West and Prunella Scales toured through Newcastle Theatre Royal, but its never been performed professionally anywhere else up here. We will be the first North East theatre company to ever stage it, and the first to bring it to places like Alnwick, Durham, Hartlepool, Hexham, Sunderland and Washington.’
Jake hope audiences come away feeling moved. ‘We hope that they fall in love with the play as we have all fallen in love with it and are inspired to go away and find out more about O’Neill and his work,’ he adds. ‘His writing is good for the soul. It reaches you, speaks of your most intimate aspirations and hopes and strives to intensify your experience of living. Most of all we hope they just have a wonderful evening in the theatre.’
