Juno and the Paycock w/ Mark Rylance - Gielgud

  So glad I gave this a miss. Such a shame, O'Casey deserves better. Perhaps get the Hammersmith Lyric to do a O'Casey production instead? As I mentioned earlier in the thread, its 2018 The Plough and The Stars with the Abbey Theatre was fantastic, remains one of the best things I have ever seen.

There were still some available at 3pm yesterday, so not a hot cake yet.

O dear.

I can’t wait to hear some comedy Oirish accents!!

I love O'Casey, and loathe the sound of what's described here!  But I'll go along in hope...

Dangerous to play Captain Boyle as an outright clown - he's revealed to be a clown by circumstances and hubris yes, but performs a dignity that's puffed up: he is the paycock/peacock after all. I think it's quite early in the play that someone says that this so-called 'Captain' was 'never a day at sea'. So yes, Captain Boyle has been a clown all along, everyone knows Captain Boyle is a sham, but nobody dares pull the edifice down - yet. He's too big a physical force, and has spent time building up this image.

The one person who shouldn't let anyone see that his feathers are falling out is the peacock himself.  So making him an audience ingratiating clown doesn't sound much like 'performed high status'.

In the scene where everyone's doing their party pieces, Captain Boyle is very critical of Joxer's failure to pitch and remember his song. He says something like 'I can't stand to see a man do a thing he can't do' (paraphrased).  So Captain Boyle is discriminating, and has taste (at least when criticising others). Why he'd make himself a rather abject clown I don't know.

And nobody is really a clown if you have feeling for the characters in the writing - their tragedy.  It's a man fashioning a version of himself that spins out of his control and flatters him - for a while.

I also thought this a dreadful production. I don't know whether it was Matthew Warchus or Mark Rylance who demanded he play the Rooster on stage again but it feels like he's copied and pasted that character (West Country burr and all) into a straight production, the rest of whose cast is treating the text with considerably more reverance. It's like watching two plays on stage and loses any coherence as a result. Only Paul Hilton can span the two, a bridge between Rylance's slapstick and everyone else's pathos - and that's because he's perhaps the consistently finest actor on the London stage at the moment, not Mark Rylance.

As for J Smith-Cameron - I don't know whether she's done much stage work recently in the States but I wouldn't necessarily say it comes across as a natural medium for her talents. I was getting shades of Father Ted's Mrs Doyle from her performance at times (to be sure, to be sure).

I thought this was misguided, misdirected, miscast, and any other 'mis' you can think of.

I'm glad I'm not the only one to find Rylance overrated.

I've always liked Rylance because every time I've seen him he's been just the right side of over-acting.  Which is, usually, pretty much the same thing as being superb.  But I've always been afraid that one day he'd tip over into pure ham - and this is that day, I'm afraid.  It's probably not intentional but his Captain Jack seemed to come from the Dermot Kelly school of Irish stereotypes.  And, from what I remember, Kelly was a lot funnier.


My benchmark for this was Ciaran Hinds and Sinead Cusack - with Niamh C and Des McAleer not far behind.  Rylance and Smith-Cameron came nowhere near.  Disappointment with Rylance's interpretation might have caused me to take too negative a view but I can't really think of any significant positives.


The pacing of the production was sluggish and the insistence (which others here have noticed) on playing the comic elements like panto meant the tragic elements almost seemed to belong to a different play (Johnny was so understated early on that his awful fate seemed to come out of the blue).  

I'm not going to go on and on moaning about the production, but I should warn against being tempted by cut price seats in the rear stalls.  Our tickets warned of a slightly restricted view due to overhang of the Circle - which was fair enough; but they didn't mention the dire acoustic which is presumably attributable to the same cause.  I had the advantage of knowing the play quite well but my companion really struggled to follow what was happening - partly because of the slightly overdone accents but mainly because the sound wasn't reaching our seats.  At the interval I had a word with the woman next to me to check that it wasn't just my hearing; and she confirmed that she and her husband were also struggling.  I presume the problem is that the performers were projecting to the back of the Gallery and the sound just wasn't getting to the seats below the Circle overhang  I'll certainly never sit there again no matter how cheap the tickets.

Congrats Were they released right on the mark? Are they avail straight through the website or todaytix?

I haven't seen this yet, but I loved the phrasing of your diagnosis jake :

"I've always liked Rylance because every time I've seen him he's been just the right side of over-acting. Which is, usually, pretty much the same thing as being superb".

Reminds me of a phrase that someone once attributed to Mae West, but I've never been able to verify:

"Nobody ever paid for 'under the top'"

I got the weekly £25 tickets for this Saturday’s matinee, so I can take my dad. Pretty easy to grab, and I was on after 10.30.

Oh dear, so many people not liking this one. How sad. Definitely marmite then.

I absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVED it tonight, and share all the feelings that westendboy had about the production.

I felt that Mark Rylance is fantastic in this! It's emotive clowning more than slapstick.

Some spoilers follow. . .

I loved the Howard Davies version, with Ciaran Hinds, which I saw from the front row at the National. It was done realistically, and movingly, and I was moved.

This version is not done realistically, it is more theatre of the absurd. The three acts are all significantly different from each other, with the trajectory of moving from comedy to tragedy.

The first act is played by a fourth wall breaking Rylance as a kind of non-silent silent movie clown (we even get silent movie style piano accompaniment music in the interval lol), complete with white-powdered face and comedy moustache, like the sad-faced Buster Keaton or like the klutzy Charlie Chaplin. I found it all MUCH MUCH funnier than the straight Davies production, as I LOVE clowning, and Rylance is a brilliant comedian. This isn't farce though, as Rylance embodies the character with severe fear and anxiety, the kind of coward who might just survive a civil war by getting paralytic and staying out of it all. Rylance is always feeling something, not just doing schtick, which is why he is so funny if you go with the style, and he shares his feckless, fearful feelings with us, constantly trying to get us onside in his relentless scheming behind the back of her indoors.

His double act comedy partner, Paul Hilton's Joxer, is a terrific and terrible rogue, scheming against everyone wickedly, including Rylance's blotto Captain Boyle, whose precious sausages he snaffles off Rylance's Boyle's plate. Since neither Joxer nor any of the other characters break the fourth wall, we are very much invited into this show from the comedic perspective of Rylance's clowning Captain Boyle, veering away from war towards distractions, which allows the horror of the civil war to perform a particularly nasty creeping turn on us as the story progresses.

After Rylance, who is a superlative, hysterically funny, conspiratorial, sad stuttering clown, and Hilton, who is wickedness run riot, I found a profound richness amongst the remaining non-clowning ensemble: most of all in Aisling Kearns's Mary, Boyle's wonderfully expressive, bold but naive, daughter, who Kearns makes the heart and soul of the piece, her eager expressive countenance ever imprinting heart-felt decency into the storytelling, as well as the extreme comedy of a good fish in bad water; I also loved Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty's Johnny Boyle, Rylance's son, whose hollowed out expression of horror brought notes of PTSD into the background of the comedy, notes that would only grow and grow; and I loved Anna Healy's Maisie Madigan, the epitome of civilian wild excess at being caught in a war.

Everyone else in the ensemble enhanced the show for me, which ended in a darkness that felt especially dark because of the comedy that came before.

At this stage of previews, I would give this 4 and a half stars, with room to grow.