JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK Gielgud, WC1

POETRY AND PITY

Tremendous swagged, fringed, and roped retro curtains , the Gielgud wanting a lot as it could 100 years in the past when Sean O’Casey’s most well-known play reached London. Before them hangs a single excessive crucifix, beneath it a easy range. And when the drapes flourish apart to disclose a Dublin tenement room, its element attracts you proper right into a hardscrabble life,right down to the frying pan and the battered tin field the place younger Mary retains her valuable hair-ribbons.

Matthew Warchus (with design by Rob Howell )does nicely to deal with the bodily element: there may be at all times a particular fascination in contemporaneous performs from previous many years, by a author who knew and lived in such actual rooms and situations. Curiously, it’s that interval actuality which wakens a wider pity for all conflicts which arduous down on the humblest. O’Casey units this in 1922, the Irish civil warfare nonetheless raging, when in a single household there could possibly be former allies falling out, republican ‘diehards’ set in opposition to ‘free-staters’. Juno and Jack Doyle’s household has its personal unusual issues. He’s an idle drunk, she nearly retains them fed, this more durable even than common as a result of daughter Mary is on strike and her brother Johnny disabled, one-armed and lame from his share within the preventing . He is a mournful occasional presence, bitterly uneasy – we’ll study why – and afraid to go away the flat. He sees nightmare ghosts, unable to relaxation and not using a candle burning safely in entrance of the Virgin Mary’s statue within the unseen room backstage. They all dwell inside a deeper violence, and all by way of the primary act come odd moments of shock: Aisling Kearns’ Mary studying aloud the element of exit-wounds on the newest younger physique discovered, Jack and Joxer, tipsily carefree, abruptly soberly nervous at a rapping on the door beneath that sounds “like no-one that belongs to this house”. Llow distant avenue sounds make heads flip sharply.

In within the foreground, and that is what which has made O”Casey’s Irish play echo by way of many instances and nations, there may be the comedy of Jack Doyle himself : an virtually music-hall flip in drunken, self-glorifying fantasy, eloquent in creative grievance about all the pieces from the clergy to “pains in the legs” hanging every time a attainable navvying job is talked about, tipsily co-dependent with the sly parasitical Joxer. There is laughter on the pair being cowed by Juno’s totally cheap furies of impatience at their lurching hopelessness and empty pleasure. Mark Rylance is on irresistible type as Jack : a piercing tipsy stare beneath heavy black brows, his tiny moustache and striped pants generally seeming virtually Charlie-Chaplin as he lurches round, airing fantasy reminiscences about world seafaring exploits (one passage on a collier to Liverpool).

He’s an exquisite joke: the immemorial Mr Hopeless, comedy drunk proper right down to a mournful little ditty a few robin, sung over the range. Rylance, as ever, is a scene-stealer. Even extra when, because the second act begins, he has been informed of a legacy and gone massively into debt for fancy furnishings, cupboards of china and glass and a sensible new swimsuit (once more, brilliantly evoked with loving element). An idle drunk who’s gone up on the earth and thinks he’s posh is after all even funnier.

But the genius of the play is that Jack Doyle is a comic book determine residing in the midst of a tragedy. He didn’t trigger it, however he doesn’t rise to it with any dignity or actual human sweetness. Juno, then again, is magnificent, and does. J.Smith Cameron (Gerri from Succession on TV!) is compelling, unforcedly actual: worn out however stuffed with hope that Jack will pull himself collectively, tenderly anxious over the gaunt, haunted youth Johnny (Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty) and tolerant of the social activism of Mary and her lover Jerry (Leo Hannah). She is all the pieces that’s first rate and, sadly for all of them, believes in hope and luck when a stranger arrives with information of their inheritance (one other sort of shock in his very look: so dapperly dressed, such a wonderful overcoat, subsequent to the ladies’s cautious drab and the shambling Jack’s tragic trousers.

We look after all of them, laughing or admiring; with Anna Healy’s Mrs Madigan they have fun and break into track (Irish songs, and odd musical moments, are brilliantly used). But no sooner have we laughed at Healey’s terrifying prime C than a funeral passes and a damaged mom is amongst them, talking the well-known prayer to the Virgin Mary to “take away hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh”. But they giggle collectively once more; somebody has to.

That the play darkens deeply in its longer second half is legendary, however no spoilers for these coming new to it. Only to say that now we have, by then, been drawn to affection and concern for the truth of the Boyles, the poetry and the pity of humanity. But will probably be soured, too, by the truth of Jack Doyle, patriarch and drunken fantasist. I used to be uneasy for some time after Rylance’s magnetism within the wonderful first scenes, questioning how nicely even this nice actor would serve O’Casey’s closing cruel dissection of a person’s egotistical worthlessness. But within the moments of Jack’s persevering with, reckless, merciless self-pity Rylance does this for us. It is each good and painful to observe.