What happens to us, if our lives turn out to be illusions? What if we no longer know where we belong? What if it feels like we are slowly disappearing into mist?
This gripping autobiographical masterpiece by American Nobel Prize winner Eugene O’Neill describes one day in the life of the toxic Tyrone family.
The father is an embittered, alcohol-guzzling actor at the end of his career; the mother a temperamental, unpredictable morphine addict in denial; the eldest son a failed actor with a beastly, cynical lifestyle and the youngest a highly sensitive poet with a likely terminal lung condition.
In razor-sharp dialogues, each of them tries to get to grips with their disappointments – in themselves and each other. Keeping action to a minimum, O’Neill drops a veritable cluster bomb of words that aim to both wound and heal. It’s a scream for love and connection by people who can’t live with and can’t live without each other. From early morning to the middle of the night, they are entangled in a moving battle with the distorted image the others have of them. It’s a battle they know they cannot win.
In a radical, multi-lingual adaptation and in the bare-bones style that has become typical of Zuidpool, Long Day’s Journey into Night is a masterpiece of language, monumental minimalism and rock-solid acting. Sofie Decleir, Laurent Capelluto, Atta Nasser and Tijmen Govaerts perform respectively in Dutch, French, Levantine Arabic and English. The performance will be surtitled in the same four languages.
