Gielgud theatre; Lyttelton theatre, LondonMark Rylance goes to fabulous extremes in an enjoyable if unbalanced revival of O’Casey’s Irish civil war drama. And a grieving family confronts its past in Alexander Zeldin’s darkly comic new play
Tim AdamsSun 13 Oct 2024 05.30 EDTShareIt’s a century since Juno and the Paycock, the second of Seán O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy, was first staged. The Observer’s then theatre critic, Hubert Griffith, took a rare ferry to the Irish capital to witness a performance that was “so packed that it almost burst the doors off the little Abbey Theatre”; and one, he wrote, that “sets an Englishman thinking with some intensity about the last few years in Ireland” – the years of the battles for independence and the civil war.
Those thoughts were prompted in particular by the character of young Johnny Boyle, maimed in one phase of the republican uprising and murdered as an informer by his comrades in the next. Johnny’s story was, pointedly, never front and centre in O’Casey’s play however, since his life, like the lives of all the rest of his hard-knock family, was lived wholly in the shadow of his riotous father, “Captain” Jack Boyle. The son is in a private tragedy in a society that remains addicted to raucous comedy. “English audiences, complacent on five years of peace, may not know what to make of him when the play comes to London,” Griffith wrote.
In this enjoyable Gielgud staging, director Matthew Warchus, in particular, still doesn’t seem to know quite what to make of Johnny Boyle, or how to handle his subplot. That storyline comes and goes here, but you never really believe in it.
You feel a little for those actors sharing a stage with the Captain, and for those characters sharing a life with himThe thoughtful disjunction of tone in O’Casey’s play is instead exaggerated, and unbalanced, by the fabulous extremes of Mark Rylance’s performance in the role of the “Captain”, into which he pours elements of Jerusalem’s Rooster Byron, and in which not only his moustache is Chaplinesque.
Rylance’s comedic repertoire is sometimes matched by his energetic sidekicks – in particular the “darlin’” Paul Hilton as Joxer Daly (whose headfirst exit through an open window is a little masterpiece of slapstick), and the statuesque Mrs Madigan (Anna Healy), who sets an operatic standard for pub singers everywhere. But mostly you cannot keep your eyes off the Captain, paycocking for all his worth, gurning from the phantom pain in one leg, then the other, never tiring of efforts to avoid work, in ardent love with his brand new gramophone player.
View image in fullscreenJ Smith-Cameron as the beleaguered Juno Boyle. Photograph: Manuel HarlanYou don’t begrudge him that attention – who wouldn’t want to spend the evening watching Rylance in full spate? – but you feel a little for those actors sharing a stage with him, and for those characters sharing a life with him. His wife, Juno, inhabited here with a certain stout resolve by J Smith-Cameron (of Succession fame), seems to have run out of ways to counter her husband long before the drama begins, and looks increasingly weighed down by the looming tenement facade of Rob Howell’s set.
As the promised legacy that offered hope of a reversal of fortunes for the Boyle family comes and goes, the edges of pathos and tragedy in O’Casey’s original never quite materialise. Warchus belatedly tries to address this by rewriting O’Casey’s ending. In the original, the play finishes as it began, with a kind of existential punchline, as the Captain once again drunkenly mangles the “state of chassis” in the world, as he searches in vain for his last dropped sixpence, oblivious to the murder of his son, or the absence of wife and daughter. Here, the “chassis” sees him sporting an unlikely pistol, with which he inadvertently shoots his drinking “butty” Joxer dead. Nothing is gained by the change.
In the same way that the newfangled gramophone becomes a character in its own right in O’Casey’s drama, an outsize prop also takes centre stage in Alexander Zeldin’s new play, The Other Place. In this case it’s a funeral urn, decorated by the dead man’s two teenage daughters, and deposited on the kitchen table by their uncle.
The uncle (Tobias Menzies, mourning in New Balance trainers) wants to scatter the ashes to mark a new beginning in the horribly fractured family – the other, more obvious symbol of that hopeless ambition are his newly installed industrial sliding doors in the kitchen of his brother’s old house. That shedding of light on past and present is painfully unwelcome to the dead man’s daughters, played with pitch-perfect sibling complication by Alison Oliver and Emma D’Arcy.
View image in fullscreen‘Pitch-perfect’: Alison Oliver (Issy) and Emma D’Arcy (Annie) in The Other Place. Photograph: Sarah M LeeThere are many notes of dark comedy in Zeldin’s direction of his play, and plenty of the pinpoint social observation he demonstrated in The Inequalities, his trilogy about the decade of austerity. Menzies and D’Arcy, the entrancingly stubborn elder daughter, deliver a climax that sent a series of collective gasps of shock through the audience on the night I went – and which does full justice to the Antigone myth, on which Zeldin’s drama is based.
Star ratings (out of five) Juno and the Paycock ★★★★ The Other Place ★★★★ Juno and the Paycock is at the Gielgud theatre, London, until 23 November
The Other Place is at the Lyttelton theatre, National Theatre, London, until 9 November