'Juno and the Paycock' review — a dominant Mark Rylance relishes the vaudevillian comedy in Séan O’Casey’s play

Read our review of Irish tragicomedy Juno and the Paycock, starring Mark Rylance and J. Smith-Cameron, now in performances at the Gielgud Theatre to 23 November.

It’s 100 years since the premiere of Séan O’Casey’s 1924 drama, Juno and the Paycock, set in Dublin’s working-class tenements – the middle piece of the Irish playwright’s acclaimed trilogy that concludes with The Plough and the Stars. As rendered here in Matthew Warchus’s starry revival, anchored by Mark Rylance and J. Smith-Cameron, it merges politics with detailed, lived-in domesticity.

Rylance plays the “paycock” (or “peacock”) of the title, Jack Boyle, also known as the “Captain” due to his much-vaunted past career as a merchant seaman – although in truth, as wife Juno points out, he only made one trip, on a ferry to Liverpool. But then every word that Jack utters is a fantastical performance, such as wildly exaggerating the leg pain that keeps him from honest employment.

Meanwhile son Johnny is actually traumatised after losing an arm fighting with the IRA, and now fears reprisal. Daughter Mary, a keen reader of authors such as Ibsen, has the hope of escape via courtship from their educated visitor, trainee lawyer Charles Bentham. He brings the Boyles life-changing news: Jack’s cousin has died and left him a fortune in his will. That sparks a lavish spending spree by the gleeful Captain.

Rylance is on imperious form here, dominating the show even before he sets foot on the stage (we first hear his lusty singing). Aided by his Charlie Chaplin moustache, he relishes the vaudevillian aspects of O’Casey’s work – which deliberately, and trickily, tilts between comedy and tragedy.

There’s a delightful bit of business when, during a row with Juno, Jack professes not to want her breakfast, only to be drawn to the irresistible smell of frying sausages like a cartoon dog. Thinking Juno has then discovered him, he tries to hide the hot pan down his trousers: lovely slapstick that is also thoroughly revealing of his slippery character.

It’s easy to understand how this maddening but charming figure keeps winning over Juno. Rylance’s connection with the audience (he often sends a wry aside our way) puts us in a similar position, so that we too feel the betrayal when he later reveals the extent of the man’s cruelty and callousness.

However, Rylance is operating in a completely different register to the rest of the cast, who, while also alert to the work’s humour, offer much more grounded naturalism. That means he frequently pulls focus unnecessarily in a scene with his clowning, and undermines some of the darker material.

Still, there are good individual performances. Smith-Cameron (aka Gerri from Succession), playing Juno for the second time in her career, supplies an effective weary yet steely stoicism. Aisling Kearns and Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty give vivid turns as the two children – one gutsy, one haunted, both eventually ground down by an inescapable cycle of poverty and violence.

Strong too are Paul Hilton as the shifty Joxer, a chancer with a nasty streak, Chris Walley as the prim Bentham, and in particular Anna Healy as the vulgar but generous-hearted neighbour Mrs Madigan, who knocks back whisky like lemonade.

Rob Howell’s striking design places the family’s dingy front room in a blasted shell of a tenement block, lit a hellish red, and Simon Baker’s ominous sound design adds to a sense of inescapable doom. Warchus’s is a notably musical production: not just in the contributions from composer Claire Van Kampen, but alert to the poetic rhythms of the text, its interweaving of folk and religious songs.

If not landing with the full force that it might, this staging still makes O’Casey’s grimly resonant point about the futile horror of civil war and sectarian politics. And, in a tale full of garrulous but feckless men, it’s ultimately the women who show strength as they bond together and look to a new day.

Juno and the Paycock is at the Gielgud Theatre to 23 November. Book Juno and the Paycock tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: Juno and the Paycock (Photos by Manual Harlan)