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Published: 8 December, 2011
by JACK COURTNEY O'CONNOR

“He’ll never blow the froth off a pint of mine again,” says the Paycock of his equally shiftless Dublin “butty”, Joxer Daly in the revival of Sean O’Casey’s masterpiece.

Set in the aftermath of the Irish Civil War, this sombre production in Howard Davies’ co-operation with Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, focuses on the futility of war and its victims.

Juno, together with Shadow of a Gunman and The Plough and the Stars (an anti-heroic version of the 1916 Dublin rising) completed O’Casey’s “Tenement Trilogy”, which proved to be his most successful work in a long career, more accessible than his more expressionistic later work.

The author opened Dublin working-class tenement life to the theatre world with its heady Irish stew of tragi-comedy and social realism when the West End and Broadway were delighting its audiences with drawing room comedy.

The plot centres on the heroic Juno, played by a demure Sinéad Cusack, whose unfaltering love for her family is the centrepiece.

She is married to ex-bargee and unemployed labourer Captain Jack Boyle (a hung-dog Ciarán Hinds, the “Paycock” of the piece).

He prefers the company of the preposterous Joxer (Risteard Cooper) to that of his family. If Juno is a splendid representation of Irish motherhood, then Captain Jack is seen as a workshy, drunken dreamer whom, curiously enough, the Dublin theatre-going public took to its heart!

The Boyle family inherit £2,000, which is presented to them by the opportunist Bentham (Nick Lee) whom Juno’s daughter Mary takes to her heart in bed, with disastrous consequences.

The Boyles become the most popular family in the tenement and beyond – until a discrepancy is discovered in the will, leaving them destitute.

There are many outstanding performances in this production: Clare Dunne’s Mary and Ronan Raftery’s Johnny Boyle, Juno’s son and Civil War victim. Bob Crowley’s wonderful, decayed Georgian interior dwarfs the slum-dwellers and creates its own urban alienation.

until February 26
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