It is easy to see from Matthew Warchus’s compelling revival of Sean O’Casey’s tragi-comic play Juno and the Paycock, about the cost of poverty and war on humanity, why it is called ‘The Irish Masterpiece.’
Juno and the Paycock was first performed 100 years ago at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1924 and is the second of O’Casey’s “Dublin Trilogy” – the other two being The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) and The Plough and the Stars (1926).
Juno and the Paycock is set in a run-down tenement flat in Dublin in 1922 during the Irish Civil War. Sharp-witted Juno Boyle is a hard-pressed mother and wife who struggles to meet basic day-to-day needs as she tries to keep her dysfunctional family together.
Her shiftless husband ‘Captain’ Jack Boyle (nicknamed because of his talent for embellishing stories about his brief career as a merchant seaman) never sails any further than the local pub with his boozing pal Joxer. He feigns an inability to work due to pains in his legs. The word ‘paycock’ is the Irish pronunciation of “peacock,” and Juno alleges her husband Jack is as vain and as useless as the demonstrative bird.
The Boyles’ fortunes look like they are about to change for the better when their daughter Mary discovers from her fiancé Charles Bentham, a schoolteacher and aspiring lawyer, that Jack is coming into a large inheritance. In his excitement, Jack vows to Juno that he will stop binge drinking with Joxer and change his wayward lifestyle. But will the anticipated fortune really stop this ‘paycock’ from its strutting?
The genius of O’Casey’s poetic writing lies in his ability to walk the fragile tightrope between humour and tragedy. His savage polemic on the folly of war and its repercussions on the most vulnerable in society is tempered with his unbounded and uncritical love for the greatest of life’s fools: humanity.
J. Smith-Cameron first played the role of Juno in Juno and the Paycock off-Broadway in 2014 with the Irish Repertory Theatre, and in her West End performance, she proves that she has lost none of her zest for the role.
Mark Rylance brings a Charlie Chaplin vaudevillian quality to his titular role of the guileful ‘Paycock’ Captain Jack, and he is well-matched with Paul Hilton as his knockabout pal Joxer Daly. Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty has great stage presence as the haunted, brooding ex-soldier Johnny Boyle, and Aisling Kearn is suitably feisty as Mary Boyle.
