When the curtain rose on the 100th anniversary production of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock at the Gielgud Theatre in London, the audience settled in for what they expected to be a landmark evening of Irish drama. What they received was something more fractured, more contentious, and in many ways more fascinating – a production that divided critics so sharply that it became a case study in the challenges of staging a masterpiece for a contemporary audience. Mark Rylance’s Captain Jack Boyle, a performance of such extravagant, vaudevillian oddity that it seemed to belong to a different play entirely, set the tone for an evening that would spark debate long after the final sixpence hit the floor.
A Play Born in Blood and Laughter
O’Casey wrote Juno and the Paycock in 1924, the second instalment of what would become known as his Dublin Trilogy, following The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) and preceding The Plough and the Stars (1926). Set in a Dublin tenement during the Irish Civil War, the play follows the dysfunctional Boyle family as they navigate poverty, political violence, and the false promise of an inheritance that will never materialise. The “paycock” of the title – a colloquial Irish pronunciation of “peacock” – is Captain Jack Boyle, a man whose vanity and indolence make him both comic and infuriating, a figure who drinks while his family starves and pontificates while the world collapses around him.
The play’s power lies in its tonal duality. O’Casey moves seamlessly between farce and tragedy, often within the same scene. The audience laughs at Boyle’s elaborate excuses for avoiding work, then recoils as the consequences of his irresponsibility destroy his family. This is not comedy softened by sentiment; it is comedy sharpened into a weapon, a tool for exposing the gap between the stories we tell ourselves and the brutal reality we refuse to face.
The Rylance Question
The central controversy of the Gielgud production was Mark Rylance’s performance. Rylance, widely regarded as one of the finest stage actors of his generation, made choices that were, to put it diplomatically, bold. His Captain Jack was a creature of exaggerated physical business – rocking a toothbrush moustache, addressing the audience directly, peering out from the corners of his eyes as if bewildered to find himself in a play at all. For the first half, as multiple critics noted, he was operating in a completely different register from the rest of the cast.
Time Out’s Andrzej Luwoski, one of the few critics to award four stars, called it “brilliantly, bizarrely funny, the sort of auteur performance that no other actor alive would so much as think of giving.” But even Luwoski acknowledged the tension: “I suspect reviews will be divided on whether it makes any sense in the wider context of the production.”
The wider context was the issue. While Rylance played to the gallery, his co-stars – particularly J. Smith-Cameron as Juno – were delivering more grounded, naturalistic performances. The result, as multiple critics observed, was a production where the actors seemed to be performing in different versions of the play. Sarah Crompton at WhatsOnStage gave it two stars, calling it “a horrible melange” where “everyone on stage seems to be performing in a different version of the play.”
The Heart of the Production
If Rylance was the lightning rod, J. Smith-Cameron was the production’s beating heart. The Guardian’s Arifa Akbar wrote that “Smith-Cameron really is the heart and soul of this production, for all of Rylance’s charisma… when the tone flips to tragedy, Smith-Cameron is tremendous.” Her Juno was a woman pushed to the edge by poverty, betrayal, and the death of her son – a figure of fierce, exhausted resilience who held the family together long after it deserved to be held.
The casting of Smith-Cameron, an American actress known for her work in television’s Succession, alongside Rylance’s English eccentricity, created an interesting cultural friction. O’Casey’s Dublin is a very specific place, with very specific rhythms of speech and social codes. The production’s transatlantic energy gave it an unusual quality – not quite Irish, not quite English, not quite American, but something new and occasionally disorienting.
O’Casey’s Enduring Relevance
What the production demonstrated, despite its tonal inconsistencies, was the enduring power of O’Casey’s writing. The play’s themes – the gap between political rhetoric and lived reality, the destructive power of male vanity, the quiet heroism of women who hold families together in impossible circumstances – remain devastatingly relevant. The Boyle family’s tenement room, with its poverty and its pretensions, its cheap furniture and its expensive dreams, is a universal portrait of aspiration thwarted by circumstance.
The play’s final scene – Captain Boyle stumbling home drunk, unaware that his son has been killed and his family has left him, dropping his last sixpence and lamenting that “the whole world is in a terrible state o’ chassis” before passing out – remains one of the most powerful endings in modern drama. It is a moment of absolute devastation disguised as a punchline, a joke that is also an indictment, a comedy that is also a tragedy.
The Revival’s Legacy
The Gielgud production closed in November 2024 with a critics’ average of 2.7 stars – one of the lowest ratings of the year for a major West End production. But low ratings do not necessarily mean a failed production. The conversation it sparked – about the limits of star casting, about the tension between theatrical spectacle and dramatic truth, about how a century-old play speaks to a contemporary audience – was itself valuable. A production that forces critics and audiences to argue about what a play means has achieved something that a safe, competent staging never could.
Matthew Warchus’s direction was criticised for failing to find a coherent vision, for allowing Rylance’s star turn to overwhelm the ensemble, and for tipping the final scene into melodrama. But Warchus was attempting something genuinely ambitious: a production that gave full scope to both the comedy and the tragedy of O’Casey’s vision. The fact that the experiment did not entirely succeed does not mean it was not worth attempting.
What the Play Demands
The difficulty of staging Juno and the Paycock lies in its demands on the ensemble. O’Casey’s Dublin is a communal space – the play is filled with neighbours, hangers-on, political agitators, and casual visitors who drift in and out of the Boyle’s tenement room. The play requires a company of actors who can shift between registers – from broad comedy to genuine menace – with the fluidity of everyday conversation. It requires a Captain Jack who is both ridiculous and heartbreaking, a Juno who is both long-suffering and formidable, a Mary whose naivety curdles into something harder, and a Johnny whose trauma is invisible until it is too late.
Most of all, it requires balance. The play’s tonal tightrope – between laughter and horror, between the personal and the political, between the absurd and the devastating – must be walked with precision. When a production tips too far in either direction, the play loses its essential power. Too much comedy, and the tragedy feels like an afterthought. Too much tragedy, and the comedy feels like a betrayal.
The Gielgud production may not have achieved that balance, but it reminded audiences why the play matters. In an age of political chaos and economic uncertainty, O’Casey’s portrait of a family destroyed by its own dysfunction – and by the political violence that rages outside its door – feels less like a period piece and more like a warning.
Sara Bright is a theatre critic and cultural journalist covering the London stage and international performing arts.
