"This 'Journey' is often downright sprightly. That doesn’t mean that after three-and-half hours in the company of the Tyrones you don’t still feel numb with fatigue...For a while, it’s a gripping, oddly enjoyable approach...In the play’s second half...the action slows down to allow each character an aria of self-explanation. And it’s then you begin to sense that something’s off-kilter in this production. Could these people really be members of the same family, or even the same play?"
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"There are big-ticket plays that terrify their actors; famous stars who fluster their colleagues; massive sets that turn environments from living things into monuments. The Bristol Old Vic’s 'Long Day’s Journey Into Night' manages to have all three problems at once in the blustery, muddled production now at BAM, where the show’s three and half hours lumber very slowly by...Although Manville and Irons find wonderful moments, the play as a whole keeps staggering."
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"Featuring underwhelming starring performances by Jeremy Irons and Lesley Manville...The show is startlingly lifeless, the majority of its potential tragic power sacrificed to mannered, unvaried performances that seldom make the dive into anything resembling emotional truth...It’s all breathtakingly pretty — and hugely distracting. Rather than a space in which an emotionally dropped-in story can play out, the set feels like an excited intellectual exercise."
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"The scathing autobiographical honesty and desolation of the playwright’s masterpiece...Manville, especially, brings that heartbroken quality to the fore in a wrenching performance...A mesmerizing symphony of rambling, barely disguised resentments and outbursts of flashing anger...Irons matches her step-by-step, his terrific portrayal of James moving sure-footedly...In this production, only Keenan, as the drunken, brothel-going elder brother, falls short."
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"Eyre’s mixed bag of a revival, one alternately engrossing and overly wound up, and in any case, disappointingly, never a soul-shatterer. The absorbing aspects have mostly to do with the motivations and interactions of Irons’s James and Manville’s Mary...It rarely has been as clear as in the way Irons and Manville impress it upon us the depths of James’s and Mary’s narcissism, how their lifelong fixations on their own stunted childhoods have rendered them incapable of nurturing anyone else."
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"Their performances brim with anguish and gritty realism, while Eyre's direction adds a dreamlike patina to this story...Irons's performance is notable for capturing the silent gestures buried in O'Neill's work that only a great actor could tease out...Though Eyre's direction keeps the action moving despite voluminous passages of dialogue, the play's second half sputters during the long scene between Edmund and James...Fortunately, this production does not drift."
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"If Eyre has guided Manville and Irons into giving performances that surely must rank among their best, he hasn't done as well by the younger generation of Tyrones...This is not the most accomplished production of 'Long Day's Journey Into Night' to come our way in recent years, but anyone who loves this piece -- one of American drama's very few masterpieces -- will be fascinated by the way Manville and Irons inhabit their characters' darkest corners."
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"It could be said that 'Long Day’s Journey Into Night' is the absolute quintessential American play—the greatest of all 20th-century American plays...Manville seizes the opportunity to turn Mary into a tour de force of unmitigated anxiety. And appreciative nods to Irons—who looks like Eugene O’Neill (!)—for giving a typically generous on-the-mark performance. Is Eyre’s meeting with O’Neill perfect? It’s a close as anyone might want. Nothing seems missing."
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