Of O'neill's Plays Are Intensely Personal Pieces of Writing

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Long Day’s Journey into Night – Study Guide - 978-1-908563-12-5 www.digitaltheatreplus.com

Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama.

All of O’Neill’s plays are intensely personal pieces of writing, most of which clearly have their roots and inspiration in the events and circumstances of O’Neill’s own life – and none more so than Long Day’s Journey into Night. This play in particular also exists as a very closed world, with little or no reference to the outside world, other than some reference to the immediate neighbours. As such, it is difficult to say definitively whether the wider political and social events of the time were a major factor.

However, no playwright exists or writes in complete isolation from the world they are writing about, so some examination of the context of both the year in which the play is set (1912) and the period during which O’Neill is thought to have written it (estimates vary, but let us say 1943-45) could be fruitful.

This section will also give some background to O’Neill’s likely experiences as a second-generation Irish immigrant to America, and to the status of two of the play’s key factors: alcohol and morphine.

1912

Cast your mind back only a little over 100 years ago, and the world was a very different place. There was no internet, no television, no air travel – even radio and telephones had only just been invented, and their use was not widespread. The world felt like a much bigger, more unknown and far less inter-connected place than it does today. This alone could account for a play like Long Day’s Journey into Night taking so little notice of the outside world, beyond the four walls of the Tyrone family home. There was little in the way of home entertainment other than perhaps playing cards (as feature in the play), board games (which don’t) or drinking (which does, a lot). Even Hollywood was only just getting started – Universal Studios was founded in June of 1912. Those cinemas which did exist were still showing early (and very short) silent movies. Younger family members would have felt very bored, and a strong desire to get out and into the nearest bar or sports venue, where most entertainment on offer took place.

Women would have had far lower status in 1912 than they do today. Women did

Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama. not have the right to vote in 1912, and indeed the Suffragettes were quite active during this time. (Women were not granted the right to vote equally with men until 1920.) Finding women in the workplace was still unusual, except for low-skilled domestic work such as cooking and cleaning. The main (even sole) expectation of middle-class women was to be a loyal wife and caring mother. This perhaps accounts for some of Mary Tyrone’s intense boredom and despair.

America as we know it today was still in its infancy. America had only declared independence from England in 1776, and spent much of the next century locked into protracted political and military disputes over how best to govern themselves. Native Americans, steadily persecuted into submission since the first European arrivals in the New World, were still actively resisting their imperial rulers in the early part of the 20th century. There were also periodic skirmishes with Spain, including a ten-week war over Cuba in 1898. In 1912, America was still working out this mess, and still adding states to the ‘United States’. New Mexico and Arizona were made the 47th and 48th state respectively in 1912 (there are 51 states today). So, America as the world power we know today was still a little way off in 1912. In terms of communication, wealth and military power, it was still relatively isolated from the rest of the world.

There was a presidential election in 1912, and Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected. He would go on to oversee American involvement in World War I, and the negotiations which surrounded the Treaty of Versailles in its aftermath.

Q: Try to make the case for the Tyrone family in Long Day’s Journey into Night as an allegory for the position of America in the world in 1912, and the conflicts and power struggles which were going on within itself at the time.

The main world news in 1912 was the launch, and then high-profile, tragic sinking of the Titanic, at the time the world’s largest and (supposedly) passenger ocean liner. The Titanic was a British-built ship sailing from Southampton to New York, whose sinking when it struck an iceberg killed over 1,500 people – including 119 Americans. The story was headline news around the world for months, and continues to fascinate people today.

In Europe, the First Balkan War breaks out between Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey – sowing the seeds for the later conflict of World War I in 1914.

For O’Neill personally, 1912 was the year he divorced his first wife (with whom he had one son), attempted suicide, and was subsequently diagnosed with tuberculosis, and had to enter a sanatorium (just like Edmund in the play). It was also the year in which his great hero, Swedish playwright August Strindberg, died.

O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh is also set in 1912.

Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama.

Q: Why do you think Eugene O’Neill makes no mention whatsoever either of the sinking of the Titanic, the 1912 presidential election, or of the build-up to the First World War in Long Day’s Journey into Night?

1943-45

Eugene O’Neill delivered the text of Long Day’s Journey into Night to his publisher in 1945 (along with the famous instruction that it was not to be published until 25 years after his death, and must never be performed). It is not known precisely when he started work on it, but we can assume it was in the few years immediately prior to 1945. This period would have seen America and the world plunged into the depths of World War II, which ran from 1939 to 1945 (America joined in 1942). Its effects were felt in almost every country in the western world, even if they weren’t directly involved. The war was known to have hugely depressed Eugene O’Neill.

His diaries from the time tell us that he followed troop movements and other developments on the radio, and tracked the war’s progression through Europe on a large wall map. Having lived in France for a while with his third wife, Carlotta, they were especially upset at the invasion of the country by the Germans. O’Neill wrote that to them it was ”almost as if California had fallen”. O’Neill was also suffering from serious health problems during this time, including neuritis (nerve inflammation), depression, bouts of flu, prostate problems and hand tremors.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, and America’s subsequent entry into the war exacerbated problems for the O'Neills. Almost immediately there were petrol shortages and it became difficult to find servants. They had to black out the windows of their large estate, Tao House, in case of air raids (though these never came to America, unlike in Europe). The Californian valley where they were living had all its Japanese-American families taken to internment camps in May 1942, along with all Californians of Japanese descent. The O’Neills knew some of them.

The staff shortage meant that the O’Neills were forced to have more regular contact with people living locally to them, by employing them as drivers, or even doing shopping for themselves. This forced contact ended some of O'Neill's isolation. One friend, Barrett Clark, felt it "helped restore the man's essential faith in a world which his reading and contemplation had, in a way, distorted." In turn, several local residents were impressed with the O'Neills' manners and friendliness.

Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama.

But a setback came in 1943, when O’Neill’s daughter Oona, a well-known socialite, got engaged to Charlie Chaplin (of silent movie fame). Oona was 18, Chaplin was 54. O’Neill said he would never speak to Oona again if she went through with the marriage. But she did, and her father made good his threat. They never saw each other again.

In 1943 the O’Neills put Tao House up for sale, citing difficulties with its upkeep during the war. They moved into a San Francisco hotel until the war ended, where O’Neill presumably wrote some at least of Long Day’s Journey.

Eugene O’Neill had spent six years in Tao House, the longest he had lived anywhere, and he was very sad to leave. He had written five of his greatest plays there, A Moon for the Misbegotten, The Iceman Cometh, Hughie, A Touch of the Poet and Long Day’s Journey into Night.

After leaving, he never wrote another play.

Q: Do you think you can see any evidence of World War II in Long Day’s Journey into Night?

Q: What evidence can you see of the greater contact with local people, brought about by the war’s staff shortages, in Long Day’s Journey into Night?

See the section above, ‘Some theories about the play’, for a theory by an American academic that Long Day’s Journey into Night is in fact an allegory for American identity just before World War II.

Irish immigration to America

Over 36 million Americans (12% of the population) are estimated to have Irish ancestry, making them the third largest ancestral grouping in the country, with African-Americans second at 13% of the population and Hispanic-Americans first at 15%.

The Irish diaspora population in the United States is roughly six times the modern population of Ireland. Those with some Irish heritage somewhere in the family tree is far greater. No fewer than 22 US presidents have had some Irish ancestry – even Barack Obama. (When Obama visited Ireland in 2011, he even joked that his surname used to have an apostrophe in it.)

Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama.

Irish immigration to America has been going on since the 1600s, and has seen several waves since then. Ireland was historically a very poor nation (although nowhere near what it was, it is still one of the poorest nations in the EU) and has unhappy experiences of colonial rule under the British and religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. All these factors caused many to seek a better life elsewhere, and Ireland is geographically positioned facing America across the Atlantic, so the United States was the natural choice for many.

Irish immigration to America in the 1800s, when Eugene O’Neill’s father arrived, was predominantly Catholic. Although the O’Neill family are actually from County Tyrone (hence the family surname O’Neill chose for the characters in the play) which is in Northern Ireland, the O’Neill’s, like the Tyrones, were Catholic. They would have joined the many southern Irish Catholics who formed communities in the cities on the east coast of the United States. Back then, most Irish migrants would have been the rural poor. Some were limited by a language barrier (Gaelic, not English, was the main language of Ireland back then), many would have been illiterate and most lacking employable skills. Life in their new home was tough, and they had to survive in any way they could.

Irish Famine

The Great Famine (as it is known in Ireland) or the Irish Potato Famine (as it is known outside Ireland) was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration which occurred between 1845 and 1852, and was responsible for the large- scale Irish emigration to the US in which O’Neill’s family would have come over.

Huge numbers of starving and sick Irish tried to escape certain death in Ireland by setting sail for Canada (which was a cheaper route than sailing directly to the United States). They endured appalling conditions on vessels that became known as coffin ships.

The famine was caused by the widespread failure of the potato harvest over consecutive years, which was due to the potato plants suffering from a fungal infection which killed them and made the potatoes inedible, known as potato blight. Potatoes were a key staple in the diet of what at the time was a very poor nation with few other foodstuffs available to them, and so it struck Ireland hard. Previous potato famines had occurred in Ireland (most notably in 1740-41) but the 1845-52 famine was the harshest and most prolonged. The Great Famine killed one million Irish through hunger and related diseases such as cholera, with a further million or so emigrating to America and elsewhere. Overall, the country’s entire population was reduced by 20-25%. It changed the

Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama. demographics of Ireland forever, with Irish historians still referring to ‘pre- famine’ and ‘post-famine’ Ireland.

Although potato blight did occur elsewhere in Europe, the Irish famine was exacerbated by complicated political and religious factors, to do with the ongoing conflict between Catholic and Protestant Irish communities, and with British imperial rule (all of Ireland was part of Great Britain until The Republic of Ireland Act secured independence for the south in 1948).

Some historians have suggested that the British deliberately caused the Irish Famine of 1845-1852 as a tactic to quell the rebellious population (though other historians dispute this, and put it down to incompetence rather than deliberate genocide). What is not in doubt is that a combination of famine, poverty and hatred of their British rulers caused many Irish to emigrate to America with little more than the clothes on their backs.

From 1820 to 1860, 1,956,557 Irish arrived in America, with 75% of these after the Great Famine. The O’Neills (and the Tyrones) would have been among them.

The Irish in New York

Eugene O’Neill’s family were based in New York, which is where Eugene was born (in a hotel on Broadway, appropriately enough). The summer house where the play is set is a bit further up the east coast, in Connecticut.

In 1910, there were more people in New York City of Irish heritage than Dublin's whole population, and even today, many of these cities still retain a substantial Irish American community.

A second wave of post-famine Irish immigration, resulting largely from a changing rural economy and the lure of high-paying jobs in America, continued from 1855 to 1921, when the Emergency Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 imposed a quota system that significantly limited immigration.

Eugene’s father, James O’Neill, on whom the character of James Tyrone in the play is based, was known to have arrived in America as a child during the mid 1800s.

Irish-American immigrants were poor, and mostly took menial jobs. In the rural areas this would have been on farms, but in the cities, as for the O’Neills, this would have been low-paid work in factories or mills for the men, and domestic jobs like servants and cleaners for the women (like the maid Cathleen in the

Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama. play).

In Act 4, Tyrone vividly describes his childhood in the play, which exactly recalls Eugene’s father James O’Neill’s boyhood experiences. O’Neill senior may well have related a story such as this to the young Eugene in real life:

“When I was ten my father deserted my mother and went back to Ireland to die. Which he did, soon enough, and deserved to, and I hope he’s roasting in hell... My mother was left a stranger in a strange land, with four small children... Twice we were evicted from the miserable hovel we called home, with my mother’s few sticks of furniture thrown out in the street, and my mother and sisters crying. I cried too, though I tried hard not to, because I was the man of the family. At ten years old! There was no more school for me. I worked twelve hours a day in a machine shop, learning to make files. A dirty barn of a place where rain dripped through the roof, where you roasted in summer, and there was no stove in winter, and your hands got numb with cold, where the only light came from two small filthy windows, so on grey days I’d have to sit bent over with my eyes almost touching the files in order to see! You talk of work! And what do you think I got for it! Fifty cents a week!” (Act 4)

Socially and politically, Irish-Americans were considered the bottom of the pile, and held pretty much the same status as African-Americans at this time. Although they obviously did not experience the same racial discrimination based on skin colour as the African-Americans, Ireland was still considered a diseased and backward country, and its people inferior to other European immigrants, prone to alcoholism and criminality. Because the Irish were ethnically Celts rather than Anglo-Saxons, racial discrimination did exist on this level. It was not uncommon to see signs in boarding houses reading ‘No black, no dogs, no Irish’ or job vacancies subtitled ‘No Irish need apply’. The references in the play to ‘bog-dwellers’ reflect some of the abuse which Irish-Americans were frequently subjected to. Irish-Americans were certainly over-represented in arrests and prison statistics, as well as in insane asylums and poorhouses. This was due to poverty and discrimination, but it contributed to the cycle of belief that the Irish were an inferior people.

Q: Eugene O’Neill was second-generation Irish-American because he was born in the United States. But what effect do you think having such experience of famine, poverty and hardship had on both him, and on the plays he wrote?

Alcohol and the Irish

Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama.

In an interesting 2012 article for www.irishamerica.com, Irish doctor Garrett O’Connor writes:

“We Irish are known for being courageous, compassionate, spiritual, creative, difficult, resourceful, witty, sad, lovable, clannish, hot headed, devious, self- destructive and brilliant. Sociologists agree that we have been the most successful and accomplished immigrant group in the United States... For all that success, it is sad to say that we are still known as a race of drunks.”

He goes on to speculate on why this might be, and puts it down to a combination of factors, including alcohol historically being the only alternative to contaminated drinking water, and as solace for a benighted race who have had to endure extreme hardship throughout their history in both Ireland and abroad. He goes on to relate his own experiences of alcoholism, and subsequently his work as an addiction psychiatrist, helping to treat other alcoholics. Read the full article here.

No one really knows why the Irish are associated with drinking so much. Some have speculated that alcoholism is genetic, and that some races are simply afflicted with the propensity to drink, and less able to cope with it. However, such theories are controversial, and sometimes come dangerously close to eugenics and racial stereotyping – both of which were put forward by the Nazis as justification for genocide. (What else could be said to be genetic? Stupidity? Madness? Criminality?) Others put it down simply to a culture passed down between the generations, part of the national identity. In his book Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America, author Tom Hayden writes:

“Drinking was the only Irish legacy passed along to me. You drink because you’re Irish, I learned, which soon became you’re Irish because you drink, an assertion of your heritage.”

This can be seen in the ongoing tradition of St Patrick’s Day, the national day of Ireland on 17 March, and which is much more enthusiastically celebrated in the United States than it is in the UK. In American east coast cities with large Irish populations you can even buy green-coloured beer on St Patrick’s Day (green being the national colour of Ireland). The day has long been used as a marketing tool for Irish beer brand Guinness.

What is indisputable are the facts. According to national charity Alcohol Action Ireland, Ireland is one of 26 nations in the European Union with the highest alcohol consumption rates per capita. In fact, the Irish drink about 20% more than the average European – with over half of all Irish drinkers classified as ‘problem drinkers’.

Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama.

In the United States, the city with the highest Irish-American population, Boston, also topped a 2012 poll2 as American ‘drunkest city’, city with 20% of the population classed as binge drinkers (though this could also be to do with the city having a large student population).

Eugene O’Neill’s family was known to have been afflicted with alcoholism. O’Neill’s brother James actually died from an alcohol-related illness, an event immortalised in O’Neill’s play A Moon for the Misbegotten.

Q: Why do you think the characters in Long Day’s Journey into Night drink so much?

Heroin in early 20th century America

Opium, morphine, laudanum and heroin are all derivatives of the opium poppy, and collectively are known as ‘opiates’. They are still used in medicine today as legitimate analgesics (painkillers), but the biggest problem with their regular use is that they are highly addictive.

Although it is not mentioned by name in Long Day’s Journey into Night, references such as Jamie’s cruel pun “Another shot in the arm” tell us that Mary is injecting the drug, which would suggest it is heroin rather than the weaker opium or laudanum she is using (opium is smoked or eaten, and laudanum drunk as a liquid).

Opiate use in humans has been traced back to the fourth century BC. It has caused addiction and conflicts around the world, and continues to be a source of the conflict in Afghanistan, where most of the world’s opium poppies are grown (and from which the Taliban are known to profit).

The drug’s use was not always taboo. In the 19th century, opium was so cheap in Europe and the United States, it became a favourite medicine among working people. Laudanum (meaning ‘to be praised’) and ‘home remedy’ tonics such as Hooper's Anodyne, were widely prescribed for a number of illnesses well into the 1930s. A preparation called ‘Godfrey's Cordial’ was even given to babies to quiet them, while ‘Mrs. Winslow’s soothing syrup’ was recommended for young children who were teething.

2 http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2012/12/28/25-drunkest-cities-2012-from-milwaukee-to- burlington-vermont.html#0a4c906c-4885-4f15-b035-df218a31bb19

Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama.

So opium wasn’t always associated with street addicts and urban poverty. It was popular among British and French intellectuals in the 18th and 19th centuries. Balzac, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the artist Gauguin were all enthusiastic opium users.

In The Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 19th-century writer Thomas de Quincey described how ”subtle and mighty opium” brought him music ”like perfume” and ”a hundred years of pleasure” in one night. But he then went on to describe its dark side, comparing his addiction to the drug to ”cancerous kisses from crocodiles” and ”thousands of years in stone coffins”.

Heroin was developed in 1874 by a London pharmacist searching for a non- addictive form of morphine. Unwittingly, he actually ended up inventing a far more potent form of the drug. It was initially marketed as a cough and diarrhoea remedy and a substitute for morphine. It was described as ‘highly effective against coughs’ and was claimed to be ‘a safe preparation free from addiction- forming properties’. It was named heroin because of its heroic qualities. It turned out to be anything but.

In Long Day’s Journey into Night, we hear that Mary was first prescribed heroin by Doc Hardy, for her pain during Edmund’s difficult birth. In Act 3 she goes to a normal ‘drugstore’ (chemist) to buy her heroin, though she appears to have an ongoing prescription for it. There is also an element of shame to the drug’s use by this point. Edmund expresses horror that she asked the maid Cathleen to go in to buy it for her, because Cathleen is a known gossip. Cathleen herself describes the disapproval she received from the chemist once inside (though this could be due to discrimination against her as an Irish maid).

In 1924, the United States Congress banned the sale, importation or manufacture of all opiates. It is now a Schedule 1 substance, which makes it illegal for non-medical use.

Q: Mary’s addiction to heroin in the play is not as serious or as destructive as the men’s addiction to alcohol. Mary is unfairly persecuted for this addiction – which isn’t even her fault, whereas the men all chose to drink. Discuss.

Theatre in early 20th-century America

The first English colony in America was established in 1607. Prior to that time, Native American tribes had their own forms of performance, but theatre (or

Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama.

‘theater’ in the American spelling) in its European form, as exists in Long Day’s Journey into Night, only really became popular during the 1700s. Even then it was rudimentary. America’s first purpose-built theatre did not get built until 1809, so most theatre took the form of travelling groups of itinerant players going from town to town and performing outdoors or in whatever suitable buildings they could find. Heating and lighting did not come about until much later, and plays had to be very limited in their props and costumes, because everything had to be loaded into carts afterwards to head back out on tour. Plays were performed once or twice in each place; runs of weeks or months like you get on Broadway or in the West End now did not exist. This made it hard to make a living, and constant touring was a fact of life for most actors, who would also often buy the rights to plays and in effect become their own managers and producers (as James O’Neill did with The Count of Monte Cristo).

Theatre-going in 18th and 19th-century America was not the middle-class activity we associate it with being today. It was popular entertainment, and as such could be a rowdy, drunken, even violent affair. In fact, theatre-going was so frowned on by the authorities that some states even banned the performance of plays in the 1700s.

The plays themselves mostly came from Britain (especially Shakespeare) or Europe, as there was not really a tradition of playwriting in the United States until much later (indeed, Eugene O’Neill is widely seen as one of the art form’s early exponents). Also popular were honky tonk nights (a music style), minstrel shows (featuring racist face painting and songs), vaudeville (songs and variety acts), Wild West shows (with real shooting), circuses and Victorian burlesque, a form of bawdy comic theatre mocking high art and culture. Home-grown American drama largely consisted of melodramas, farce and poetic dramas. Acting was a disreputable profession, with female actors in particular considered little better than prostitutes.

The advent of rail transport in the mid-1800s made touring productions easier, and electric lighting meant they could be more easily performed. As the century progressed, American theatre became influenced by the Realism movement, which began towards the end of the 19th century and marked a major stylistic shift in theatre leading into the 20th century (and which was known to have influenced Eugene O’Neill – see Realism section in ‘Influences’ below).

This was the situation when James O’Neill (aka James Tyrone in the play) entered the acting profession in the 1860s. By this time, New York had established itself as the centre of American theatre. The art form was starting to become more respected, sophisticated and profitable. But America was such a vast country, and theatregoers still not as numerous or well heeled as they are today, that to make a living as an actor still meant spending most of the year on tour – a fact blamed for Mary’s unhappiness, and her son’s misbehaviour, in the play.

O’Neill himself spent his first seven years on the road with his parents, staying up late and hanging out with bawdy and drunken actors, before being sent to a

Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama. strict Catholic boarding school (which must have been quite a shock, by comparison).

Q: James Tyrone’s choice of career as an actor is ultimately to blame for all the ills of his family – far more so than his drinking. Discuss.

Q: Eugene O’Neill’s theatrical background was the source of all his unhappiness. He would have been a lot happier if he had never set foot in a theatre at all. Discuss.

Performance History

World premiere 10 February 1956 Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, Sweden

American premiere 7 November 1956 Helen Hayes Theater, New York

UK premiere 8 September 1958 Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

London premiere 24 September 1958 Globe Theatre, London (transfer of Edinburgh production above)

Other significant productions

1971 Production directed by Michael Blakemore at the National Theatre, London. Laurence Olivier starred as James Tyrone. This production was adapted into a televised version, and aired in 1973; Laurence Olivier won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Single Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role.

1971 Production directed by Arvin Brown at the Promenade Theatre, Broadway, New York, with Robert Ryan, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Stacy Keach, James Naughton and Paddy Croft.

1973 The South Australian Theatre Company's Melbourne production is considered one of the landmark productions in Australian theatre.

1986 Production directed by Jonathan Miller at Broadhurst Theatre, Broadway,

Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama.

New York, with Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey. A televised version of this production was aired in 1987.

1988 Production at the Neil Simon Theatre on Broadway, New York, directed by José Quintero, and which played in repertory with Ah, Wilderness! (in which the author’s youth and family are depicted as he wished they had been), featuring the same actors.

1988 Swedish revival at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, directed by Ingmar Bergman.

1991 Production directed by Howard Davies at the National Theatre, London, in co-production with Bristol Old Vic. Starred real-life husband and wife Timothy West and Prunella Scales.

2000 Production at the Lyric Theatre, London, with Jessica Lange, Charles Dance, Paul Rudd and Paul Nicholls.

2003 Production at the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway, New York, starring Brian Dennehy, Vanessa Redgrave and Philip Seymour Hoffman, directed by Robert Falls. Won a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.

2007 Irish production at the Druid Theatre, Galway, with James Cromwell and Marie Mullen, directed by Garry Hynes.

2011 Major revival at the Apollo Theatre, London, with David Suchet, Laurie Metcalf, Trevor White, Kyle Soller and Rosie Sansom, directed by Anthony Page. This is the version now available from Digital Theatre.

Film adaptations

1962 General release movie version starring Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson, directed by Sidney Lumet. At that year’s Cannes Film Festival four of the actors won Best Actor awards. Hepburn’s performance later drew an Oscar nomination.

1982 Made for TV film, with an all African-American cast of Earle Hyman, Ruby Dee, Thommie Blackwell, and Peter Francis-James.

1987 Made for TV film featuring the cast of the 1986 Broadway revival, starring Kevin Spacey and Jack Lemmon. Lemmon was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Made-for-TV Movie.

Award winning UK playwright and teacher, Fin Kennedy explores the dark recesses of a troubled past in Eugene O'Neil's family drama.

Interesting fact: There is a theatre in New York City named after O’Neill. The Eugene O'Neill Theatre has housed musicals and plays, and at the time of writing is currently home to subversive comedy-musical The Book of Mormon.