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Mark Rylance mesmerised audiences together with his Olivier Award-winning flip as visionary layabout Rooster Byron in Jerusalem. Now, he’s taking part in a boozy ne’er-do-well of a extra old school kind in Irish playwright Sean O’Casey’s 1924 basic, in a manufacturing that’s wealthy in hilarity however just a little brief on enchantment.
J Smith-Cameron (also referred to as tantalisingly agency lawyer Geri in Succession) brings loads of staunch power to the title’s Juno, her shoulders bearing the load of a ineffective husband, a war-wounded son, and a placing daughter in an impoverished Dublin tenement. And Rylance finds all of the silliness within the position of the patriarchal Paycock (aka Peacock) Jack Boyle, a former sailor whose life’s nice labour is avoiding work – till an surprising inheritance units him preening.
There’s darkness aplenty within the background, with Johnny (Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty) skulking on the nook of the stage, mourning the arm he misplaced in a combat for Irish independence that gained’t let him relaxation. However the play’s finest moments are its silliest, with the primary act giving Rylance countless alternatives for mischief, superbly abetted by Matthew Warchus’s path. Jack and his much more disreputable buddy Joxer (Paul Hilton) have countless comedian bits of enterprise, bringing severe talent to Punch and Judy-style moments of naughtiness: Rylance pinches scorching sausages then hides them agonisingly in his lap; Hilton swallow-dives out the window when fearsome Juno seems.
This old skool wife-dodging humour is considerably at odds with a manufacturing whose advertising emphasises Juno’s wit and resilience: in actuality, Warchus doesn’t do a lot to replace both the gender roles or the aesthetic of this stubbornly conventional play.
Rob Howell’s design affords the type of gray, dilapidated room that’s just about business normal for revivals of basic Irish works – its copious furnishings constraining the actors within the second act, earlier than it’s dragged off within the type of prolonged, teacup-clattering scene change you not often get within the West Finish lately. When Warchus dials up the violence of the play’s surprisingly bleak third act, it appears like a magican has whipped away the tablecloth from underneath the crockery, in a clattering tonal shift that’s a shock after the light home comedy that’s gone earlier than.
It is a play that’s stuffed with betrayals. A well mannered drawing room betrayal, the place foppish English solicitor Mr Bentham (Chris Walley) misleads each Jack and his daughter Mary (Aisling Kearns) with the hope of a brighter future. And its louder echo, the far higher betrayal of the British authorities, and the Catholic church, which collectively have left this household perpetually cheated of the happiness that might have been theirs.
A silver crucifix is suspended above the stage, suggestive of this painful context. However by some means, that deep sense of injustice and ache doesn’t get house to breathe right here, in a tenement crowded with furnishings and nimble bits of enterprise. Nonetheless, Rylance’s charisma knits collectively a manufacturing that’s stuffed with roustabout hilarity and poignancy mingled collectively, vivid and bleak without delay.
The Gielgud Theatre, till 23 November; www.junoandthepaycock.com
