Long Day's Journey Into Night

This powerful play is a dramatized autobiography of the great American playwright, Eugene O'Neill, winner of  the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Why do we continue to find Eugene O'Neill's family drama so moving? Partly because the play draws so closely on the author's own experience... [but] what also grips us is the tension between O'Neill's tight classical structure and the surging contradictions of family life

Harrowing... the dramatic impact is shattering... The passage in which he describes his dirt-poor childhood is overpoweringly moving

O'Neill keeps control with dry humour. This is an acute study of the behavioural ruts as well as the mercurial complexity of family relationships

Epic... a tale of monstrously corrupted intimacy

Eugene O'Neill was born in New York in 1888 and died in Boston in 1953. One of America's greatest playwrights, he was three times awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.

Long Day's Journey into Night was written in 1940 but not staged until 1956, after O'Neill's death. Unashamedly autobiographical, it is, as he puts it himself in the dedicatory note, 'a play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood', a harrowing attempt to understand himself and his family.

Eugene O'Neill

Historically important... Theater of great scope and grand design

The full range of the human and the divine is called into play

There is a manifest integrity about his work, a ruthless self-exposure, and a determination to venture into territory where few dramatists dare to tread

In this take on Aeschylus' The Oresteia, O'Neill substitutes the New England House of Mannon for the House of Atreus and concocts a typically over-the-top cocktail of sex, envy, adultery, matricide and inescapable guilt

Set in New England just after the end of the Civil War, Mourning Becomes Electra is O'Neill's three part reworking of themes from Greek tragedy. 
 
This adaptation of Aeschylus' Oresteia by one of America's greatest playwrights is a landmark in the history of theatre.

Eugene O'Neill

Praise for Mourning Becomes Electra

Historically important... Theater of great scope and grand design

The full range of the human and the divine is called into play

There is a manifest integrity about his work, a ruthless self-exposure, and a determination to venture into territory where few dramatists dare to tread

Historically important... Theater of great scope and grand design

The full range of the human and the divine is called into play

There is a manifest integrity about his work, a ruthless self-exposure, and a determination to venture into territory where few dramatists dare to tread

Historically important... Theater of great scope and grand design

The full range of the human and the divine is called into play

There is a manifest integrity about his work, a ruthless self-exposure, and a determination to venture into territory where few dramatists dare to tread

Books by Eugene O'Neill

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