The bowwow bravado that made Brian Cox the compelling linchpin of HBO’s Succession has been imported to London’s West End. Cox is currently inhabiting James Tyrone, the dyspeptic, popular Irish actor and paterfamilias in Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night (written in 1941 and first produced in 1956). Cox is, to put it mildly, a hot ticket.
As rough and sturdy as a tree stump, with broad shoulders, a deep chest, and a large, finely shaped head, Cox is some sort of proletarian dynamo who seems physically punch-pressed out of O’Neill’s stage directions: “The stamp of his profession is unmistakably on him.... The actor shows in all his unconscious habits of speech, movement, and gesture.” Here, Cox is not speaking as the spendthrift kingpin of a media empire but as the penny-pinching, self-made, Celtic player who has traded his chance for greatness for the comfort of boulevard paydays, touring in The Count of Monte Cristo.
