It is Sunday, and my daughter has yet to forgive me for insisting she accompany me to the Friday night Eugene O’Neill play, aptly named, ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’. A major portion of Act III was cut and still, the play lasted an epic three-and-a-half hours! Deceptively advertised as “humorous, moving and atmospheric”, there were very few points where the audience laughed, probably because the scenes were too uncomfortably true to life as lived in this addiction-prone island. Or perhaps, we have finally reached the stage where drunken antics are no longer seen as funny. As a mostly autobiographical glimpse of O’Neill’s dysfunctional family, the audience might have been better prepared for this poignant and depressing play had O’Neill’s own description of his writing been utilised: “in tears and blood ... with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones”. The actors, highly talented with impressive resumes and even more impressive memorisation skills, deserved a better response than the attrition from an almost full theatre at opening to what appeared to be less than half full at the end.

I think it would be difficult to come by a more accurate theatrical portrayal of the patterns and dysfunctions of an alcoholic/addict family. This play was written in the 1940s yet it hits just about every base of the Laundry List for Adult Children of Alcoholics, codified by Dr Janet Woititz in 1983.

Step by agonising step, we watch the family disintegrate as their secrets are revealed.

Throughout, we see played out the adage, “The sins of the fathers will be visited upon the sons (and daughters)” and the credo of alcoholic families, “don’t trust, don’t talk, don’t feel”. Guilt, blame, denial, victimisation, mistrust, low self-esteem, accusation and counteraccusation permeate and poison the love each member feels but cannot express for the others. They dance close and retreat precipitously, run the gamut from raucous laughter and song, to violence and maudlin tears, speak truth in fits of anger only to apologise out of guilt for causing pain.

This play was extremely well crafted, revealing secrets by skilful, painstaking degrees in a kind of case-study of dysfunctional family dynamics without the benefit of counselling, treatment or resolution. Family patterns of emotionally and/or physically unavailable fathers, irrational thoughts, contradictory actions, addiction and the desire for oblivion are recurring themes. Set in a seaside town, loneliness and isolation are underscored by the all-pervasive sound of a foghorn. The director, Timothy Trimingham Lee, a native Bermudian transplanted to London, speaks of the universality of the themes, stating that O’Neill has depicted “a home that anyone can inhabit and recognise”, and a family introduced so that we “might better understand, appreciate, and cherish” our own families.

The characters are the Tyrone family: James, his wife, Mary and their sons Jamie, age 33, and Edmund age 23. From an opening scene of a flirtatious couple with their sons offstage in the dining room, the sound of Edmund coughing uncontrollably sets the scene for the drama to unfold, as the apparently loving family quickly degenerates into angry, shouting, brawling hard-drinking men and an unfulfilled, lonely woman longing for oblivion and losing herself in morphine dreams.

Mary, wife and mother, is the Designated Patient, “the one person in a family or group who’s singled out as sick or abnormal, allowing everyone else to feel healthy by comparison”. Played by Joyce Springer, who possesses an impressive array of credits in stage, film, television and radio, she ably portrays a woman starting out full of hope following treatment for morphine addiction and slowly sinking into loneliness, despair, and relapse — a classic demonstration of the uselessness of only treating the addict, who must return to the same family and situations that caused the addiction in the first place.

James, husband and father, is in denial that his drinking and miserly behaviour have any impact on the family situation. Instead he blames every one else. Masterfully played by John Atterbury, whose screen credits include ‘Dr Who’, ‘Harry Potter’, ‘Order of the Phoenix’ and ‘Gosford Park’, Mr. Atterbury realistically depicted the blustering, egotistical, selfish actor who never quite lived up to his full promise. Hints of his poverty-stricken Irish background peep through whenever he loses his temper. This happens often, particularly with his older son, Jamie, who is the one most like him.

Samuel John very credibly portrays the Scapegoat, tormented older son, Jamie. He is an unapologetically alcoholic whoremonger who appears to take a sick delight in taunting his father by speaking truths everyone would rather brush under the carpet. Mr John’s interpretation of a man too drunk to pass out is right on the money. Athletically capering around the stage, tunefully singing sea shanties at the top of his lungs, loudly whispering family secrets and his conflicted feelings to his brother, turning from combative to maudlin and tearful and back at the drop of a hat, his stage behaviour was probably too familiar to those with alcoholic family members to elicit the laughter that may have been expected.

Joe Jameson was aptly typecast as Edmund, the youngest of the family, and, it is said, a thinly disguised self-portrait of the playwright, O’Neill. Edmund tried to escape the family madness at an early age, but illness has brought him back to the fold, bringing him face to face with his misplaced guilt and overactive sense of responsibility for his mother’s sobriety. Mr Jameson plays his part with sensitivity, delicately layering his fears for his mother under brusque instructions to her. His sense of hopelessness and helplessness are skilfully rendered as he tries to be the peacemaker and build bridges between family members only to pick up the bottle in despair.

Although each family’s story is different in the details, it is a sad and uncanny truth that all substance abusing families live out similar dynamics. O’Neill had his own family as an example, and the three years he spent here in Bermuda, where the sale and consumption of alcohol are endemic, must have given him much meat for his observations of families torn apart by addiction.