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Succession's Brian Cox stars in an American stage epic... but at three-and-a-half hours it can feel like a cheerless misery ultra-marathon, writes PATRICK MARMION

Was ever a play better titled? Eugene O'Neill's 1941 autobiographical American drama now starring Brian Cox is sometimes hailed as one of the greatest plays of the 20th century

Here though he goes down-market and back in time as James Tyrone, a miserly former actor-manager in 1912, left with nothing in retirement but faded memories of former glories and the semi-comic conviction that his beloved Shakespeare was a good Irish Catholic. And their two sons (Daryl McCormack from Bad Sister on Apple TV+ and rising star Laurie Kynaston) are dipsomaniac drifters - one with a taste for prostitutes, the other suffering from tuberculosis (or ‘consumption’ as it was then known). Nothing wrong with the acting then, but still Jeremy Herrin’s morose production left me feeling buried alive in Lizzie Clachan’s dour, coffin-like set of undecorated boards and costumes of greyed-out greens and beige.

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