Salford theatregoers can look forward to a new production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night arriving at an intimate venue in the city next month.
Award-winning northern theatre company Elysium is marking the 70th anniversary of Eugene O’Neill’s acclaimed autobiographical drama with a three-week tour that will visit Salford’s Empty Space Theatre on 22 May at 7pm.
Often regarded as the greatest American drama of the 20th Century, this Pulitzer Prize-winning play has rarely been performed outside London.
But Elysium’s new production, directed by Jake Murray, will make its northern premiere on a tour which will come to The Empty Space, a 155-seat black box theatre on Kansas Avenue.
August 1912: the Tyrones gather in the family home on the coast of New England. After years of separation, they are reunited again, full of hope for the future. But as day passes into night, their love will be tested to the utmost as the ghosts of the past come to haunt them and they are all drawn back into a past they hoped to escape.
Set across one single summer’s day, the four main characters grapple with the realities and consequences of their failings, representing O’Neill’s very own real struggles with his family – a mother with a drug addiction, an embittered alcoholic father and two maladjusted brothers.
The play, published posthumously in 1956, is widely regarded as O’Neill’s magnum opus. It premiered in Sweden in February 1956, followed by Broadway the same year, winning the Tony Award for Best Play.
It was last staged in the UK in London in 2024, starring Brian Cox but until the rights became available, it has seldom been possible to tour regionally until now.
Starring in Elysium’s production are company stalwart and co-founder Danny Solomon as Jamie, the family’s eldest son; Edmund Dehn as the family patriarch James Tyrone and Sarah Dorsett as Mary Tyrone, his long-suffering wife and recovering morphine addict.
Daniel Bradford plays youngest son Edmund (O’Neill’s self-portrait) and introduces Darlington’s up-and-coming actress Macy Stasiak as Cathleen, one of the family’s housekeepers. Macy makes her adult professional theatre debut in this role. She made her professional stage debut in the West End as a child playing Debbie Wilkinson in Billy Elliot aged 9.
Elysium Theatre Company is no stranger to Greater Manchester, having played Salford’s Lowry Theatre (‘The Moth’ and ‘The Island’), Hope Mill (‘Miss Julie’), HOME (‘Jesus Hopped The A Train’) and 53two (‘Days Of Wine And Roses’). They return to the Empty Space in Salford with ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ after performing there with ‘Playland’ in 2019.
An award-winning theatre company based in Durham, they have been touring world theatre across the North for nearly ten years.
Founded by Jake Murray, formerly of the Royal Exchange Theatre where he directed Andy Garfield in ‘Romeo And Juliet’ and Tom Murphy’s ‘A Whistle In The Dark’, Manchester actor Danny Solomon and actor/ writer/ producing powerhouse Hannah Ellis Ryan, they are thrilled to be returning to Salford to bring O’Neill’s greatest play to a new generation of theatre goers.
Jake Murray, Artistic Director of Elysium and Director of this production felt keenly that now was the time to take this great play on the road and introduce this phenomenal playwright to wider audiences across the north of England.
“Long Day’s Journey’ is our most ambitious production yet. One of the world’s greatest plays, usually the preserve of the most experienced and well-resourced companies in the world, which we are now bringing to the people for the first time in a generation, if not the first time ever and we are so excited and proud of this,” he said.
“I grew up reading O’Neill and this play has always been one of my favourites. My father directed it for the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester when I was 14, and directing this now myself is a fulfilment of a lifelong dream.
“It is what theatre should be – moving, beautiful, life-affirming and to be doing it with these actors and bringing it to this audience, which we have got to know so intimately as we built the company up over these years is a real honour and a thrill.
“We believe it will strike a chord, and I cannot wait to see what people think of it!”
Long Day’s Journey Into Night kicks off its three-week tour of the North East and North West on Tuesday 12 May in Hexham and concludes on Saturday 30 May in Lancaster, stopping in Salford on 22 May at The Empty Space theatre.
Tickets for O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into the night are available here.
