Playhouse creatures: Sebastian Nübling's Long Day's Journey into Night
On the German director's playful take on Eugene O'Neill's family drama.
I paid a flying visit to Berlin last week, in which I made it my mission to squeeze a lot of theatre and wine into a short space of time, something in which I largely succeeded. While I was there I also wrote a guest post for Exeunt about Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s new Inside No. 9 show Stage/Fright. I’m a fan and this is very much written from that perspective, but it ticked all my boxes.
I also wrote a very short piece on the ongoing situation in Serbia for The Stage. An awful lot has happened since I last wrote about this and I plan to write a more in-depth update for this newsletter later in the month.
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The safety curtain is misbehaving. It inches upwards, stops, descends. A second attempt also fails. A stage manager appears, apologies for the technical difficulties. Then Bernd Moss, as James Tyrone, rises from his seat and starts to address the audience, an old thesp holding court.
German theatre has a real thirst for Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night at the moment. There have been recent productions at Staatsschauspiel Dresden and Staatsschauspiel Nürnberg, and now this one from Nübling, making his Deutsches Theater debut after a long association with the Maxim Gorki Theatre.
For his production of Eugene O’Neill’s family drama, Nübling has the Tyrones slug it out in the stalls, trading O’Neill’s fog-wreathed Connecticut summerhouse for the plush and faintly stuffy interior of the theatre itself. This makes sense. The Tyrones are a theatre family after all, with papa Tyrone still using every opportunity to remind his sons of his past stage successes. Moss interacts with those sitting around him, occasionally standing on his seat to be better address the crowd. He showboats and conducts polls, asking for a show of hands: Who here owns an apartment? Who’s disappointed with their kids?
While James regales the audience, his morphine-dependent wife Mary (Almut Zilcher) rants up in the balcony and his addiction riddled offspring – Jamie and Edmund - lob insults from the boxes, heckling him, like Statler and Waldorf only infinitely more caustic.
The cast are decked out in red, the exact same shade as the upholstery, as if they are part of the theatre, as if they have emerged from its walls. Jamie (Moritz Kienemann) wears a sparkly jacket over a T shirt emblazoned with the words ‘thankless child,’ while Edmund (Svenja Liesau) sports a puff sleeved, faintly Edwardian blouse befitting a consumptive (lovely work by costume designer Una Jankov). Red happens to be an excellent colour for concealing blood stains, which is a good thing because this is a family that takes an almost perverse pleasure in wounding one another.
Nübling mines a surprising amount of humour from O’Neill’s text and adds a fair bit of his own. The first half of the production is very funny, albeit in a deeply bleak way. He’s also found a way to make this potentially stately play feel energetic, with Kienemann bounding around the balconies, clambering over audience members as he goes (muttering multiple little “entschuldigungs” along the way). At one point he scales the iron curtain in a way that generated a collective intake of breath from the more safety conscious among the audience. In Nübling’s hands the theatre becomes a jungle gym, and the audience respond accordingly, watching more actively, swivelling in their seats. One guy even gets up and perches on the edge of the stage to improve his view.
The production also pushes the generational divisions to the fore. Tyrone senior exudes snugness over the fact he has attained a level of financial security and professional success that has evaded his children in a way that may well feel depressingly familiar to younger people in the arts struggling to get a foothold in an increasingly precarious sector as rents continue to rocket. (Even in Berlin, rents have risen 22% since 2022).
Then the liquor makes an entrance, wheeled on by Julia Gräfner, playing a combination of stage manager and the Tyrone family maid, Cathleen, whose primary role is to keep them well-watered. Bottle after bottle is plonked upon the floor. It’s booze o’clock in the Tyrone household and the cast begin to enthusiastically tip the contents of the bottles down their necks as Bach’s Air on the G String flutters incongruously in the background.
Kienemann plays Jamie as someone arrested in childhood and given to petulant outbursts, while Liesau is more muted in comparison. Zilcher’s Mary shifts between bitter tirade and near catatonia, though she’s not without a wicked streak. At one point, she pretends to expire on a plastic sun lounger to get a rise out of her kids.
When the iron curtain finally deigns to rise, we see – nothing. A void. A black expanse into which a cloud of smoke is released. Slowly it fills the stage, growing in size like a mini mushroom cloud or the exhalation of a dragon, before drifting out into the audience and misting the air around us in a way that reminded me of Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project in which he filled the interior of the Tate Modern with faintly apocalyptic haze.
Into this mist, the cast emerge wearing bunny masks. Not cute bunnies, no, these ones are ratty and matted like forgotten soft toys that have mouldered away at the back of a cupboard. It’s all very Lynchian. (It’s hard not to watch without thinking of this.)
As surreal as some of the imagery is, there’s a psychological acuity to the family’s interactions. At one point Tyrone and Edmund engage in an almost balletic act of synchronised imbibing, tipping copious amounts of liquid down their throats. Whenever Edmund flags, his father raises the bottle to their lips, egging them on. By the end he is forcibly pouring the stuff in Edmund’s mouth in a way that borders on torture. The whole scene horribly encapsulates the enabling that exists in some families, with Tyrone senior managing to turn drinking into a competition (one he’s confident he can win).
Afterwards, Liesau reels around in a state of extreme inebriation while Kienemann’s Jamie careens across the stage on a metal trolley like a child with an inadequately developed sense of risk. Father and son then engage in a very literal battle for control of the house, or in this case the theatre, commanding the lights to dim and the red velvet curtains to fall. Increasingly Moss’ Tyrone comes across as a hollow-souled showman, palming playing cards and subjecting us to his patter, an increasingly brittle and irritable edge to his demeanour as he verbally jousts with his pickled kinder.
While the first half was fast-paced and playful, the house lights up, the actors bellowing across our heads, the second half is groggy and foggy, woozy and downbeat. Eventually a clapboard house (the work of designer Dominic Huber) emerges from the gloom behind them, only for it to be slowly pulled apart by the family, its different sections split from one another, creating cracks in the structure. This broken building is an obvious metaphor for the family but one could argue also for a country in which the “firewall” against the right is also fracturing as the CDU colludes with the AfD in order to pass new migration legislation to “secure German borders.” On the day of the premiere cultural workers published an open letter in response to this and there was a large protest outside the CDU headquarters. Perhaps I’m being too literal in making this connection; either way the house becomes increasingly present, increasingly the focus. Almost imperceptibly at first. the set starts to revolve – the house dominating the stage, then shrinking away as it spins.
It’s probably worth noting at this point that I have only Duolingo-level German, so some of my understanding of the production is in part reliant on a recent re-read of the play and from quizzing people in the bar afterwards. There was actually something really enjoyable, however, about being untethered from the text and getting to focus on the stage imagery and character dynamics.
I also benefited from an early glimpse inside the Deutsches Theater’s luxuriant rehearsal facility during the first week of rehearsals, when the production was still at the table-read phase of the process, and the cast were in the midst of debating the exact nature of Edmund's malaise. I rarely get to see work at that stage of development so it’s fascinating to see what those initial seeds have grown into (plus Zilcher roared some of her lines at me and she was fearsome).
In the last minutes, barbed wire is unspooled across the stage and Gräfner delivers an epilogue, a piece written by playwright Sivan Ben Yishai (who previously collaborated with Nübling on Stage Insult). The text, called How to Stay, was originally presented in Weimar last year, and it speaks of visas and exile, sickness and cancellation, the pressure to be less ‘present’, just to be less. This does feel like a bolt-on to a certain extent. It doesn’t feel like it has emerged organically from what has gone before, but I’m also not sure it matters. Long Day’s Journey into Night is a play written at the tail-end of the 1930s about a family intent on doing damage to itself and incapable of seeing beyond their four walls. It definitely resonates and it’s possible to see why theatres are drawn to it at the moment. At the same time, in ending the performance as he does, it sort of feels like Nübling is interrogating (and maybe even sending up) the tension between theatre’s desire to speak to the current moment vs its desire to continually revisit 20th century American classics - or perhaps he’s just decided that instead of trying to force things it’s preferable to end with words written now rather than in the mist of the past.
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.
Elektra – Brie '‘Captain Marvel’ Larson stars in a new staging of Sophocles’ play from Daniel Fish, the creator of the ‘sexy’ reimaging of Oklahoma, in a translation by poet Anne Carson. Stockard Channing also stars in the production which opens at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London’s West End on 5th February
Mami – After completing his trilogy of shows about death – consisting of three largely wordless pieces, Stretchmarks, Goodbye Lindita and Taverna Miresia: Mario, Bella, Anastasia, Albanian-born Greek director Mario Banushi returns with another similarly personal piece about the complexity of the mother-child relationship. It premieres at Onassis Stegi in Athens 6th February.
The Years - Internationaal Theater Amsterdam artistic director Eline Arbo’s production of the novel by Nobel-winner Annie Ernaux transfers to the London’s West End after a acclaimed (and occasionally faint-inducing) run at the Almeida Theatre. It opens at the Harold Pinter Theatre on 6th February.
Thank you for reading. If you have any recommendations, tips, or thoughts about this newsletter, you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com
Holy shit! You are one lucky reviewer! Many thanks for your hours of travel, glasses of wine, love of theatre and rich, evocative writing. Could something like this ever come to the US? W/stage subtitles, or an English version? Wow.