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ROUND-UP 2016
Star columnists run through what’s impressed them this year

THEATRE
GORDON PARSONS

A POWERFUL production of Eugene O’Neill’s epic family drama Long Day’s Journey into Night at Bristol Old Vic brought home the playwright’s description of a work written in “tears and blood.”

For once, the play did not focus primarily on the frustration of James Tyrone, with Jeremy Irons’s modulated performance conveying the guilt-ridden desperation of dealing with his damaged family. It allowed Lesley Manville’s Mary Tyrone, agonisingly escaping further into her drug-tortured dreams, to register the play’s dramatic tension.

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