Jessica Lange is the big draw in the new production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue, and good she is too. But the evening also marks a rare return to Britain by the Canada-based director Robin Phillips and it is both his masterly control of mood and his revisionist approach to character that make this a production to treasure.

We all know that O'Neill's play, set in a gaunt Connecticut house in the summer of 1912, is laceratingly autobiographical: a work, as he said, 'written in tears and blood'. But Phillips's production reminds us that it also deals with one of the great themes of modern drama: the conflict between truth and lies. In this play, the greatest illusion of all is that the Tyrones are really a united family: in fact, the rich, retired actor- father, his increasingly detached wife and his two sons--one a drunken wastrel, the other a consumptive poet--are both solitary and guilt-ridden. But the family also finds it impossible to confront the truth about Mary Tyrone: that she is a morphine-addict beyond hope of rescue or rehabilitation.

What you see in most productions is the gradual revelation of the father's skinflint nature and his wife's victim status. But something unusual happens here. The hauntingly beautiful Jessica Lange shows Mary to be an emotional vampire who sucks the life-blood out of the family. She never lets them forget that her drug-dependence started with the birth of her son, Edmund, and her husband's engagement of a quack doctor.

'Please don't think I blame your father, Edmund,' she says at one point. 'He didn't know any better. He never went to school after he was 10.' Miss Lange delivers such lines in the casual throwaway tones of someone who is an expert at ensuring that old wounds stay permanently open. You feel, from her devastatingly unsentimental performance, that O'Neill may have learned to live with the family's sins but that he never quite forgave his mother.

Surprisingly, it is the father you feel most for in this production. Charles Dance has none of the residual Irishness or actorish flamboyance Olivier brought to the role--I still see the latter stepping athletically back off a table after singeing his fingers on a light socket--but he has an extraordinary quality of muted despair. When he explains his stinginess by saying that as a boy he worked 12 hours a day in a machine-shop, you feel it is the simple truth. Dance also brings out the protective love Tyrone still feels for his unreachable wife: at one point he lightly caresses her breasts in the gathering dusk with a rueful tenderness.

The other performances, by Paul Rudd as the boozy older son and Paul Nicholls as the tubercular younger, are decent rather than exceptional. But the evening, aided by Paul Pyant's lighting and Matt McKenzie's sound, has an extraordinary power. The foghorns boom, the darkness descends, the faint echo of a Chopin waltz is heard in the distance and we find ourselves drawn into the heart of a family forced at long last to face up to the bitter truth about itself.

Booking until March 3, 2001 at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue (020-7494 5047).