Juno and the Paycock…..at the National Theatre

This is a co-production with the Abbey Theatre of Sean O’Casey’s bleak play set in Dublin’s tenements in the arc of the Civil War that divided Ireland politically and culturally for generations afterwards. It is regarded by many as a modern stage classic….

O’Casey surely observes and understands his Irish society, with its nationalist aspirations; bone-china sensibilities; and its many layered hypocrisies jostling for a place around the tea table….he certainly catches the elemental nature of family relationships in this matriarchal society over-run by priests and patriots…he certainly shines a hard light on the unforgiving viciousness of the republicanism that demands more and more blood for Ireland….and there’s also perhaps wistfulness for a world of socialist egalitarianism in which perversely the Irish working class are wilfully uninterested….

This produces one of the most searingly honest and touching moments when Jack Boyle flings his daughter’s books aside cursing them as the cause of both his shame and hers….Jack Boyle’s horror at his unmarried daughter’s pregnancy being the one thing that unites all the play’s very different men in common cause…

The heart of the play rests upon the relation between Juno Boyle and her husband Jack (the paycock) and at least in this production it was difficult to divine the bonds that have held them together before we meet them on stage in the clever, delightful minuet they play out over the preparation of cooked breakfast…

….Maybe only in the family hooley is there any sign of some binding warmth between Sinead Cusack and Ciaran Hinds….and to be honest I think the deficiency lies more with the author than the actors….though at times Hinds was indistinct and Cusack oddly underpowered…though equally on occasion they all sparked and sparkled to effect… particularly in the ensemble of the hooley with its mawkish Irish sentimentality and vivid dialogue….

O’Casey makes the women strong and sympathetic. They are his heroes…not the men….they are the ones who bear the largest burden of the poverty but still hold on to a sense of something nobler beyond the immediacy of their plight. They are the ones who make the life bearable in this bleak reality but aren’t destroyed by it….as opposed to men who fritter their existence away in a drunken haze without much thought for others…living on the deluded hopes of the big win rather than making a living in the hard reality of the here and now. For men this is a world of drunken pipe dreams and feckless irresponsibility; for the women there’s hard work and the harder dream of making their children’s lives better than theirs…

All this is sharply caught by O’Casey but what he doesn’t catch is the hopeless blindness of loving the wrong man….that must be at the heart of Juno’s relationship with the Paycock she’s married….as it seems also to be the destiny of Mary who chooses to love the equally shallow talker, Charles Bentham…the would be solicitor who brings the Boyles the will he’s written with its easy promise of an inheritance….that turns out to be as worthless as its author…

O’Casey tries to convince us Juno is still taken with her Paycock’s fancy feathers at the beginning of the play but by its end she’s given up on him…that being the case I thought that the play fails to make that case to any sustained extent…and without that heart a lot of the drama becomes stagey and overblown.

I found myself more taken with the subsidiary characters…and Joxer Daly is played with flamboyant brilliance by Risteard Cooper. Joxer is essentially the chancer whose behaviours are a commentary upon the morals of others in this world… he is a mille-feuille of hypocrisies; a selfish opportunist; a shiftless drinking companion; a selfish social leach and a fair weather friend…Joxer is a wonderful creation…given wonderful lines…and is wonderfully played. Indeed the play motors whilst Joxer is on stage and flags when he’s not….

Janet Moran’s Maisie Madigan is fun and vividly grotesque in the party scene. Ronan Raftery as Jonny Boyle makes what there is to make of a character less than clearly drawn; the union man, Jerry Devine is in love with Mary and is the man we hope is nobler than the other flawed men but turns out to be stained with their same empty vanities in the end. Tom Vaughan-Lawler’s portrayal matches Casey’s harsh judgement on his socialist comrades. And Nick Lee’s smooth Charles Bentham catches the vainglorious schoolmaster who over-estimates his own ability….and a little education being a dangerous thing has seldom been better caught in character.

The production sprawls uneasily across the vast stage of the Lyttelton Theatre and that staging gives too much space to this most claustrophobic of worlds and the narrow hopeless lives lived in it….and perhaps that is the thing the militates most against this production feeling satisfying….it also encourages the characters to emote in order to fill the vast emptiness of the stage. At times that takes from the startling poetic beauty the Irish invest in the English they ordinarily speak…and which O’Casey hears so well and which he gives to us without affectation.

That must necessarily bring us to Mr Tancred played by Bernadette McKenna. McKenna gives us faithfully what O’Casey gives to Mrs Tancred to say…but…again O’Casey faultlessly observes Ireland’s ambivalent relationship political assassination and the interplay of public mourning with the ceremonies of death employed exploitatively to dignify what is nothing less than murder. Mrs Tancred’s invocations of the Virgin Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus ring as true today as they would have in the 1920s. But at the heart of what she says – something which O’Casey obviously felt strongly – to my ear is over-wrought and teeters on the gauchely sentimental….the more so as Juno is made to repeat her speech word for word at the play’s end.

I’m glad I went…and O’Casey owns a brilliance…especially in his way of uniting the cold observation of the outsider with the richness of the language he’s come to love….but…there it is… the little but… the but that is left hanging….the but…that makes me feel….there’s something missing….