Writer: Seán O’Casey
Director: Matthew Warchus
You’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve walked into the wrong theatre during the first act of this revival of Irish classic Juno and the Paycock and instead mistakenly taken a seat in Fawlty Towers playing at the Apollo Theatre next door. So broad and clownish is Mark Rylance’s performance his Dublin patriarch is like Basil, Sybil and Manuel all rolled into one. The buffoonery occasionally makes for good comedy, but Rylance’s overbearing presence on stage obscures Seán O’Casey’s examination of the new Irish Free State of 1922.
Not much happens in this first act of director Marcus Warchus’s production apart from establishing that ‘Captain’ Jack Boyle is a perpetually drunk waster. His long-suffering wife Juno is the only one in the Boyle family with employment. While Jack actively avoids work and any offers of jobs that come his way, daughter Mary is on strike fighting for workers’ rights. Son Johnny can’t work due to the injuries he received during the Easter Rebellion. With Jack spending all his time in local bars, it’s a wonder that the tenement family can make ends meet.
Rylance’s Jack is always drunk, but watching someone act drunk quickly becomes as wearying as watching a real drunk; there are only enough jokes you can milk from pratfalls, wardrobe malfunctions – he never dresses as a peacock – and slurring speech. Charlie Chaplin is mentioned later on in the play, and there’s the sense that Rylance, slapsticking his way through the entire play and with his similar toothbrush moustache, is channelling the silent movie star. At one point, he gurns, tongue-out, towards the irresistible sausages, which he has earlier refused, cooking on the hearth. Impressive physical comedy, perhaps, but it seems out of place in a play that Casey called a tragedy in three acts.
Here, in the Gielgud’s promotion for the show, Juno and the Paycock is labelled a ‘tragicomedy’, but it’s only in the last act when Rylance is off-stage that the awful choices facing Juno, Mary and Johnny become clearer. It just doesn’t make sense why they would choose to obey Jack when he is clearly such a loser. There’s no other side to him, hidden underneath the stout and whiskey he drinks, to warm to. He doesn’t seem to have a heart, nor is he threatening. His leathering of Johnny isn’t convincing. If he is to be feared, the threat of violence should be constant. If he is to be lovable, let us see at least a sign of empathy or kindness.
All the emotional depth has to come from J. Smith Cameron as Juno, raging at her husband at the start of the play and then being more tolerant of him once the family thinks they have money coming its way. But even though Juno is mentioned in the play’s title, Smith Cameron’s performance is always in the shadow of Rylance, who must continuously be mumbling or eye-rolling, in character, it must be said, whenever anyone else is speaking. The stories of the serious Mary (Aisling Kearns) and the haunted Johnny (Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty) are sidelined in the constant attempts at jokes.
Only Mary’s gentleman friend, Mr Bentham, championing yogis and Pranas, seems to silence Jack when he comes for the party in the second act. As Bentham, Chris Walley is wonderfully patronising in the way in which he deals with a family that is so obviously beneath his social class. While it’s okay that Jack literally fawns over him, he doesn’t have to fall off his stool or throw a cupful of tea behind his shoulder as he gesticulates wildly mid-conversation. In the final act, Warchus changes the story slightly to make the end more farcical than ever.
Rob Howell’s tenement set is suitably dreary, with the torn scarlet red stage curtains making a stunning addition. However, it’s unclear what point Warchus is trying to make in a final scene change, which reveals a marble pietà. The cast now looks as if it is suddenly navigating a Beckettian wasteland when a more gradual erosion of their lives, under the promise of a new Ireland, would be more effective.
Despite the faithful attention to O’Casey’s lines, this version of Juno and the Paycock is more a vehicle for the comedy talents of Rylance, and it’s sure to please the legions of his fans. But O’Casey aficionados will likely be disappointed.
Runs until 23 November 2024
