Independent Theatre to Present Eugene O'Neill's LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

After a highly successful 30th birthday year, which included productions of Athol Fugard's MASTER HAROLD" ... AND THE BOYS, as well as the Australian premieres of John Logan's PETER AND ALICE and Alexi Kaye Campbell's BRACKEN MOOR, Independent Theatre kicks off its 2015 season with one of the world's greatest plays - Eugene O'Neill's LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT.

Rob Croser has loved the play since he first read it, aged 21, then saw the South Australian Theatre Company's brilliant 1973 Union Hall production, directed by Rodney Fisher.

Independent Theatre first produced the play in 1986, with Roger Marshman directing Rosie Johnston and Allen Munn as the parents, with David Roach and Croser himself as the sons. Now, Croser is directing, and David playing the father!

O'Neill is the father of modern American theatre. He dragged it out of its 19th century world of melodrama and farce, and into dealing realistically with tough social and human situations, and paving the way for Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee.

From 1916 to the mid-thirties, O'Neill enjoyed triumph after triumph - iconic titles like Anna Christie, Desire under the Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah! Wilderness and The Iceman Cometh. He won 4 Pulitzer Prizes, and is still the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In the early 1940s, sick and depressed, he sat down to write the story of his own family - "a play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood". He never intended it to be performed. Fortunately, for the world of theatre, his widow Carlotta overruled his wishes, enabling its first performance in 1956. And the play has captivated audiences ever since.

O'Neill's Irish-born father was one of America's most popular and successful actors. His mother was a convent-girl, unprepared for the on-the-road life of an actor's family. Following O'Neill's birth, an unscrupulous doctor prescribed her morphine, to which she became addicted, on-and-off, for over twenty years.

The "long day" of the title is in the summer of 1912, when the younger son, Edmund (the O'Neill character) learns that he has tuberculosis. From breakfast till after midnight, we watch, spellbound, as father and sons wrestle with their fears that Mary's anxiety over Edmund will drive her back to her morphine. As she slips further away from them, all the family's fears and recriminations emerge, in a tragic, poetic cycle of blame and ultimate understanding.

O'Neill's masterpiece has all the emotional impact of Greek Tragedy or Grand Opera. Yet, it is one of the subtlest, truest depictions of a family confronting its demons in all literature. Only someone who had lived it could have written it.

This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see this classic of world theatre, which has not been seen in Adelaide since Independent Theatre's own 1986 production.