Juno and the Paycock

It's got to be said, Irish playwrights have their own personal brand of misery. "Juno and the Paycock" by Sean O'Casey is a long, slow burning play that simply revels in poverty and gloom. A piece that is all the more anguished because it's also regularly so funny. This co-production between the Abbey Theatre, where the play premiered, and the National Theatre should have been perfection. It isn't.

Howard Davies and Bob Crowley have encased the whole thing in a production of unnecessary beauty. Set in a Dublin Tenement during 1922, Crowley's set seethes with faded grandeur to the point of looking gorgeous. The Georgian features elegantly flake off the walls, cracks have never looked so pretty, while the whole thing is given a painterly look thanks to the artful lighting. This would be praise were in not for the fact that it totally undermines the poverty that the protagonists are suffering through.

Juno Boyle is the matriarch of a severely impoverish Irish family living in squalid conditions, a single room in a crowded building (or it should be, here it's huge and not that grim). Through the course of the play we see her compassionate resolve waiver, but never break, as she strives to keep her family together. The play charts the Boyles as they receive an unexpected inheritance, begin to change their lives and then suffer a serious of colossal disasters as a result of the sectarian violence and just plain bad luck. This description might make the play seem action packed, which it is, but not until after the interval. Act I is a dirge with almost nothing happening at all.

Juno is played by Sinéad Cusack, who offers the finest of the performances, making the dying moments of the show absolutely gut wrenching. Ciarán Hinds tumbles about the stage as her deeply unpleasant husband and he epitomises the show's problems. He's a magnificent actor but he's just too charismatic, Jack is hateful in so many ways and yet somehow Hinds turns him into a hero. The two children are terrifically well played: Clare Dunne and Ronan Raftery (displaying the finest limp I've seen all year) bringing humanity to characters who ever so slightly feel like archetypes. The cast is enormous, excessively so considering doubling (tripling even) would have made little difference to roles like "Second Neighbour".

If you can slog through what is a difficult Act I then you're in for a traumatising but fascinating Act II. Many people couldn't, with an unsurprising number of newly empty seats appearing after the interval. Squalor given a rosy hue, even when the acting clicks there is always the nagging feeling that things aren't so bad (even though they most definitely are). A difficult to stomach play that deserves better.

(Review of Performance on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012 at the National Theatre, Lyttelton)