1956 This was a notable year for theatre (see 12 May), the year in which British theatre broke the fetters of old-fogeydom with Look Back in Anger. John Osborne was, however, not the only playwright looking back that year. Improbably, Eugene O’Neill’s searingly retrospective play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, saw its first performance at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden, on 2 February 1956. O’Neill was three years dead (which did not prevent a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Long Day’s Journey).
In the play O’Neill depicts the cauldron-like family situation in which he was brought up: notably a skinflint, former-matinee-idol father (James Tyrone), who is willing to let his tubercular son, Edmund, die rather than spend money he can easily afford. Completing the Tyrone family are an alcoholic elder son, Jamie (who may have deliberately killed a younger son of the family, Eugene, in the cradle), and a morphiniste mother. The action covers one typical tortured day in the Tyrone household in 1912 on the New England coast, fog-horns booming their melancholy obbligato, as the Tyrone family drench themselves in whisky, narcotics and mutual recrimination.
O’Neill completed the work in 1941 and dedicated the manuscript to his (third) wife, Carlotta, with the inscription:
For Carlotta, on our 12th Wedding Anniversary
Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play – write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.
These twelve years, Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light – into love. You know my gratitude. And my love!
GENE
Tao House
July 22, 1941
The manuscript was then locked up in the vault of his publisher, Random House, with the instruction that it was not to be published or performed until 25 years after the playwright’s death. Carlotta, however, donated the copyright to Yale University, who authorised its performance and publication a mere three years after O’Neill’s death. His wish that the first performance should be in Sweden, the country which had given him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, was, unlike the date restriction, observed.