Sean O’Casey documented Dublin tenement life in the bitter, hopeful years that birthed an independent Eire and its national theatre, the Abbey. His 1924 play is a meaningful choice for the NT’s first co-production with its Irish counterpart.
Sinéad Cusack is an upright hard-working Juno; Ciarán Hinds her blarneying, workshy husband Jack, the ‘Paycock’ of the title. But fluency and even authenticity are missing from Howard Davies’s enjoyable production, which gets a little stuck in one-note performances and broad comedy.
A stuck door on press night didn’t exactly ease the flow: Cusack thumped it while Hinds ingeniously called for a key. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. The tipping point between humour and pathos is seriously skewed when the entrance of your harbinger of death, the bereaved mother of a Republican youth who was ‘riddled with bullets’,
is greeted by a jolly round of applause.
But it wasn’t the only time when I was more interested in what was happening off-stage than on. And it’s not always easy to see the bigger story each character brings to the room.
Take Juno’s daughter Mary (Claire Dunne, lovely) who reads Ibsen and goes on strike; and her boyfriends, local leader Jerry Devine and Charles Bentham, the educated lawyer who tempts her parents into debt with promise of an inheritance. Tom Vaughan-Lawlor is every inch the smitten swain but doesn’t bring much of the street with him. And Nick Lee’s Bentham is a burly dullish suit: there’s little to explain Mary’s infatuation or his desertion.
The family’s struggle on the bread line is undermined by Crowley’s set, which looks artfully distressed down to the bullet holes. So does the slapstick one-upmanship of Hinds’s Jack and his loser pal Joxer (Risteárd Cooper, excellent). Bland ‘Oirish’ music between scenes confirms the sense that we’re lurching towards vaudevillian squalor-chic.
Maybe the history was always going to outgun the drama. The off-stage fight between the IRA and the Free Staters, shooting each other over a partitioned Ireland – is the vicious context. And we don’t feel quite enough of it in this able, detailed revival.