the ronnie republic: Bristol Old Vic

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May 14, 2016

Drama teacher took on 11,500-mile trip to see Jeremy Irons in Bristol Old Vic play Follow us: @WesternDaily on @TheRonnieRe

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By Western Daily Press Western Daily Press | Sat 23 Apr 2016

A man who flew 11,500 miles to see Jeremy Irons in a play at Bristol Old Vic had the surprise of his life when the Oscar-winning actor came out to meet him.

Gary File, a drama teacher

from New Zealand, had flown to England to see Jeremy Irons

perform in A Long Day's Journey into Night at the King Street Theatre

on Wednesday night. Unbeknown to him, his son Kiernan had

contacted Irons, who surprised Mr File by inviting him into his dressing

room for a chat after the performance.

Mr File taught drama in a high school in New Zealand for 40 years and as a retirement

gift to himself he wanted to see this classic play at the Bristol Old Vic with Jeremy as James Tyrone.

Kiernan wrote to the debonair star to tell him about his father's globetrotting trip.

The letter read: "I know he will appreciate the experience regardless. However, I was wondering whether there was any chance Mr Irons would be willing to briefly meet my father at the conclusion of the show? He doesn't know I have written this, so there is no pressure if this is not possible.

by Taboola

"I thought I would at the very least try as he has given so much to our family and to generations of drama students

in New Zealand, and asked for nothing in return.

"A surprise like this would make his trip."

Despite being exhausted at the end of the epic and heart-rending three hours 20 minutes show, Jeremy happily agreed to an audience with the long-serving teacher. Over a glass

of whiskey, the pair discussed the play and their mutual passion for the theatre and sailing.

After the meeting, Jeremy said: "We all have that one teacher who inspired us to become the people we are today. From reading his son's letter, it's obvious Gary File is one of those teachers to many of his students.

"I'm so pleased to be able to meet Gary and congratulate him on 40 years of teaching drama to young people. I wish him a very happy retirement and thank him for making the long journey from New Zealand to see us this evening."

A thrilled Gary added: "It was quite a surreal experience because when you've admired an actor since the 1980s and you finally go into a dressing room and meet them like that and they are so warm

and generous it takes your breath away.

"He was so kind and welcoming and interested in what someone like me had to say about the play – when you're talking to one of the world's premier actors it's remarkable. It was a bit hard to take in when I was first told I was meeting him after the show and it all happened so quickly."

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Apr 11, 2016

Long Day's Journey Into Night review – Jeremy Irons and Lesley Manville shine with sexual passion and rage

4/5stars

Bristol Old VicRichard Eyre rushes through Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece but gets to the heart of the tortured love of the Tyrones, played mesmerisingly by his leads

Outstanding … Lesley Manville and Jeremy Irons in Long Day’s Journey into Night. Photograph: Hugo Glendinning

Michael Billington

@billicritic

257

Comments

Richard Eyre famously directed a 90-minute version of Ghosts at the Almeida. Ibsen’s play had a profound effect on Eugene O’Neill’s lengthy autobiographical masterpiece, which Eyre now steers home in three and a quarter hours. For my taste, this is too fast but there is no denying this is a distinguished event with a cast headed by Lesley Manville, who was Mrs Alving in Ghosts, and Jeremy Irons, returning to the theatre where he started to be part of its 250th anniversary.

But timing matters with O’Neill as much as it does in a Wagner opera. I suspect Eyre is seeking to contrast the brisk allegro of the play’s opening with the long adagio of its tragic end where the four members of the Tyrone family confront the appalling truth. But too often the tempo is unvaried, so that we miss the almost comic pattern of accusation and retraction that afflicts all the characters. When James Tyrone, a celebrated actor who sold out to commercial success, recites Shakespeare and his tubercular son Edmund recites Baudelaire, we should also feel them dwelling on the consolations of poetry rather than rushing through the speeches as they do here.

There are, however, many virtues to Eyre’s production. I’ve never felt so strongly before the sexual passion that Tyrone and his morphine-addicted wife, Mary, still feel for each other after 36 years. Manville is also outstanding as Mary. She mesmerisingly captures the violent mood-swings of the addict, switching in a second from girlish friskiness to mordant recrimination. She conveys Mary’s inner anxiety through a compulsive talkativeness and physical restlessness that leads her to be forever needlessly patting cushions. In Manville’s expert hands, O’Neill’s play becomes Mary’s tragedy: the story of a woman whose drug dependence was the result of her husband’s stinginess and who journeys into a past filled with religious faith and innocent hope.

Loss of faith affects all the characters: in the case of Tyrone, it is faith in his potential as a great Shakespearean actor. Irons has, of course, played Shakespeare but he remains unusual casting for the role. His forte is to suggest a refined asceticism whereas O’Neill’s character is a broad-shouldered, hard-drinking figure of Irish peasant stock. But, although cast against type and not always secure with the lines, Irons brings out strongly Tyrone’s tortured love for his wife: the moments I shall remember from his performance are those where he gazes at her with a sad-eyed mixture of guilt and longing.

The two Tyrone sons are also very good. Hadley Fraser has just the right blend of man-about-town ebullience and self-loathing as the worldly James Tyrone Jr and Billy Howle, a graduate of Bristol Old Vic theatre school, lends the consumptive Edmund a fitful romanticism and tainted hopelessness: it struck me the character is a direct parallel to Oswald in Ghosts. Jessica Regan also appears to telling effect as a caustic Irish maid who has the capacity for contradiction that blights her employers. It’s a great play filled with what the American critic Harold Clurman calls “the soulful poetry of despair and forgiveness”. And, although Eyre’s production often goes at too great a lick, it gets there in the end with the characters frozen in a deeply moving pietà in which Manville’s Mary takes on the quality of a wrecked madonna.