Review of Juno and the Paycock at the Gielgud Theatre: A Playful Buffoon, a Fraught Family, and the Quiet Collapse of Dreams

Rated 🍯🍯🍯🍯

Juno and the Paycock Cast. Production photography by Manuel Harlan

Overview: A Snapshot of a Dying Dublin

Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock immerses us in the cramped, grimy tenement life of 1922 Dublin, where political strife and grinding poverty intersect to disastrous effect. The Boyles—led by the feckless, drunken “Captain” Jack Boyle and his long-suffering wife, Juno—cling desperately to survival, hope, and, at times, delusion. Their daughter Mary is striking for workers’ rights while entertaining dreams of upward mobility, and their maimed son Johnny wrestles with guilt over his wartime past.

This fragile family unit teeters on a promise of sudden inheritance, only for circumstances to unravel with devastating swiftness in a final act that exposes the depths of their vulnerabilities. Though steeped in Irish nationalism and political commentary, the play transcends its context to offer something universal: a study of flawed humanity, of survival at the cost of morality, and of the quiet, shattering futility of lives burdened by external forces far beyond their control.

The Review: Hilarity and Humanity on the Gielgud Stage

This production of Juno and the Paycock at the Gielgud Theatre delivers a richly textured and nuanced smorgasbord of humor, tragedy, and raw human emotion. Directed with a sharp eye for the absurd, the play balances O’Casey’s biting social critique with a warmth that invites the audience to laugh even as they sense the inevitability of doom.

Mark Rylance’s Captain Boyle: A Buffoon for the Ages

Mark Rylance’s turn as Captain Jack Boyle is nothing short of astonishing. His drunken shambles, punctuated by pompous monologues and theatrical bravado, elicit riotous laughter from the audience—but what makes this performance truly remarkable is its depth. Rylance keeps one foot firmly planted in realism, ensuring that Boyle’s absurdity never slips into slapstick.

Rylance delivered us a Captain Boyle whose drunken ramblings make you laugh in the moment and then haunt you hours later because—damn it—there’s a grain of truth buried in all that bluster. It’s a bold interpretation, one that plays with O’Casey’s text but never undermines its intentions. And the fact that Rylance had the bee laughing at all the obvious moments, as well as at a few others that the audience did not seem to find very funny? That’s a rarity for the bee.

J. Smith-Cameron’s Juno Boyle: Strength in Silence

J. Smith-Cameron’s Juno straddles the line between resilience and vulnerability with remarkable precision. On the surface, she exudes grit, holding her family together with sheer force of will. Yet she leaves just enough space for the audience to glimpse the cracks beneath her armor. Her portrayal avoids the trap of turning Juno into a saintly matriarch; instead, she is achingly human, capable of both judgment and forgiveness, strength and indulgence.

Her reaction to Mary’s predicament in the third act, for instance, felt steeped in compassion, but it also hinted at unspoken guilt—was this forgiveness, or penance for encouraging Mary’s ill-fated ambitions? And yet, there’s no grand declaration. Smith-Cameron lets Juno’s complexities simmer quietly, leaving the audience to extract what they will. The world isn’t kind to women like Juno; it squeezes them dry and then casts them aside. And the audience is left, not with triumph or vindication, but with a heavy sense of inevitability.

The Production: A Triumph of Atmosphere

From the cluttered, claustrophobic set design that pulls the audience into the Boyles’ crumbling tenement, to the evocative use of lighting that shifts with the family’s fortunes, this production is a sensory feast. The second act, with its gaudy gramophone and ill-advised new furniture, captures the family’s fleeting delusions of grandeur with tragicomic flair. And the ensemble cast—particularly the oily, parasitic Joxer Daly—brings O’Casey’s world to vivid, heartbreaking life. Ultimately, Juno and the Paycock is more about atmosphere than plot. O’Casey lets the story sneak up on you, spending two acts steeped in the texture of these people’s lives, until the devastating third act forces you to reckon with the quiet horror of their choices and circumstances.

The Bee’s Ponderings: Spoilers Ahead

Beyond the laughter and applause, the bee found itself buzzing with questions long after the curtain fell—particularly in the tangled moral dilemmas of the third act. Here, with due warning that spoilers lie ahead, we’ll delve into the deeper questions posed by O’Casey’s tragic masterpiece.

Johnny Boyle: A Broken Soul on a Shaky Pedestal

Johnny is perhaps the most enigmatic character in the play, precisely because O’Casey gives us fragments of his psyche without ever fully explaining him. His betrayal of his comrade to the Free State forces is one of the play’s most ambiguous threads. Did he act out of principle, desperation, or sheer survival instinct? And does his wartime sacrifice—losing an arm for Ireland—absolve him in his own eyes, granting him the moral authority to condemn Mary’s “disgrace”? His judgment of Mary reeks of hypocrisy, but it also reveals a profound self-loathing, a need to project his guilt outward rather than confront it internally. His hallucinations and paranoia suggest a guilt far deeper than standard PTSD; he is a man gnawed at by his own choices, and finds it difficult to forgive others' transgressions because he is unable to forgive his own.

Juno: Silence as Strength—or Complicity?

The world loves to lionize women like Juno as paragons of resilience, as though managing disaster with stoicism is some kind of moral high ground, rather than the only option left on the table. Juno is not immune to the allure of “getting above her station.” Sure, she grumbles about the debt, but then she gleefully brings home a gramophone—no practical purchase there, just an indulgence. And her dressed-up appearance in the second act is not the armor of resilience; it’s evidence that she’s just as intoxicated by the promise of social mobility as her husband. The bee is of the opinion that her “resilience,” if we even want to call it that, is an adaptive survival mechanism, not some innate moral virtue.

Consider, for example, Juno's relationship with her son Johnny. If she is the balanced, level-headed and intelligent person that we're all led to believe she is, how come she never once suspected Johnny's less-than-honourable involvement in the death of the Tancred boy? Or did she pick up on his guilt, but choose not to say anything about it? Wasn't the reaction he displayed when the mother of his dead comrade came into the Boyles' house indicative of his involvement in the whole affair? Weren't his hallucinations indicative that what happened to him was not just standard PTSD from battle, but something deeper that was gnawing at his conscience?

So, did Juno know about Johnny’s betrayal? The signs were all there: his reaction to Mrs. Tancred, his refusal to face the IRA, his deteriorating mental state. It seems almost impossible that a woman as perceptive as Juno wouldn’t have suspected. But if she did, her silence is fascinating. Is it maternal protection? A refusal to shatter what little remains of her family’s dignity? Or is it an act of denial, a way to sidestep the moral reckoning of acknowledging her son’s betrayal?

Juno's reaction to Mary in the third act is where things get particularly thorny. Juno spends much of the play projecting her hopes for escape onto Mary, encouraging her strike and applauding her for reaching beyond the Boyle family’s grim legacy. But when that gamble collapses—first with Bentham’s betrayal, then with Mary’s pregnancy—it’s impossible not to see Juno’s complicity. Perhaps her blanket forgiveness of Mary (which astonished the bee, to be honest) stems from recognizing that Mary, like herself, is also a product of circumstance, not some moral failing. And maybe, just maybe, it’s O’Casey whispering that even Juno, the “saintly mother,” is just one more flawed human doing her best in a rigged game.

Mary Boyle: A Future Shaped by Tragedy

Mary is a fascinating counterpoint to her brother. Where Johnny wraps himself in the past, Mary is oriented toward the future—whether through her relationship with Bentham or her strike for workers’ rights. But her muted reaction to Johnny’s death raises critical questions. Has she grown so estranged from him that his death barely registers? Or is her subdued grief a reflection of how emotionally exhausted she has become by the weight of her own circumstances? Why do neither Juno nor Mary dwell on Johnny’s betrayal? Perhaps they don’t have the bandwidth for such moral inquiries—survival leaves no room for introspection.

It’s worth noting how O’Casey keeps the siblings’ moral arcs separate. Johnny’s betrayal is never explicitly confronted by Mary or Juno, nor does Mary’s predicament intersect with Johnny’s fate in any meaningful way. Is this a flaw in the narrative, or a deliberate choice to show how fractured the Boyles’ family unit has become? Perhaps it’s both. The absence of a reckoning feels like a missed opportunity, but it also underscores the disintegration of familial bonds under the weight of external and internal pressures.

It’s also striking how little Juno and Mary reflect on Johnny’s betrayal, even after hearing the news of his death. Perhaps they don’t have the energy or bandwidth to grapple with it—after all, survival has become their singular focus. But this absence of reflection also speaks to the play’s larger critique of Ireland’s political and social fabric. Johnny’s betrayal, his execution, and the family’s muted reaction to the cause of the execution even as they reacted viscerally to the news of death, reflect a society so fractured by war and ideology that personal morality has become almost irrelevant. Juno and Mary grieve the loss of Johnny, but not the reasons behind it, because in O’Casey’s Dublin, morality is a luxury few can afford.

Joxer: Parasite Extraordinaire

Joxer Daly remains a highlight and a horror—a man so hollow he thrives off the misfortune of others. He is one of those contemptible characters that, given the emptiness of his own life, seems to take a tremendous amount of pleasure in the buffoonery as well as misfortunes of the Boyle family, for no other reason than that it exists in front of him to be taken apart and made fun of. But his delight in Boyle’s buffoonery also reveals something darker: the laughter Joxer elicits, much like Boyle’s drunken monologues, carries a shadow of despair.

Conclusion: A Play That Lives Beyond the Curtain

Juno and the Paycock refuses to tie its loose ends. This production captures the messiness of O’Casey’s vision, leaving the audience with questions rather than answers. However, the political backdrop of 1922 Dublin, crucial to the story’s stakes, occasionally felt distant, and the IRA’s looming presence might have been made more palpable to tie the Boyles’ personal tragedies more directly to the sociopolitical forces shaping their world. Mary, for all her pivotal role in the play’s events, occasionally felt like a cipher. While her conflicts—a pregnancy out of wedlock, a failed relationship, the judgment of her family—were clear, they didn’t land with the emotional depth they could have. Her muted reaction to Johnny’s death, in particular, left the bee yearning for more. Was it estrangement? Emotional exhaustion? Some deeper, unspoken anger? This play seemed to shy away from answering those questions, leaving her character somewhat underdeveloped. Whether this is an inadequacy of the writing itself or the direction, the bee does not know. Further, Juno’s silence regarding Johnny’s betrayal and Mary’s circumstances, though intriguing, could have been more deeply mined through staging and direction to highlight the unspoken weight of her internal struggles.

For the bee, those questions buzzed long into the night, a reminder of why theatre matters: it holds a mirror to humanity in all its imperfect, heartbreaking, and deeply funny glory. The bee loved it.

Four stars!

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Watched November 2024 at the Gielgud Theatre, London.