THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Seán O'Casey
Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Ave, London W1D 6AR, until November 23, 2024
This is the much-anticipated pairing of Mark Rylance with J Smith-Cameron, star of the New York stage, but now internationally recognised as Gerri from the HBO smash hit series Succession. It's a triumph.
Both sets of fans will need to adjust a bit as this is no easy star vehicle, instead it's an Irish tragicomedy, first staged in 1924, and set just two years previously during the heat of the bloody Irish Civil War. Reading up on your Irish history will help here.
Matthew Warchus, a regular collaborator with Rylance, has mastered what's key to O'Casey, namely that tonal shift from heightened melodrama one minute to knockabout farce the next.
The play has become a classic because the story of the Boyle family is achingly and recognisably human across all cultures. This family, like every family, is caught up in their own hopeful delusions, while war rages outside their window and literally bursts in on them despite attempting to keep their heads down. O'Casey was an avowed socialist who detested nationalism of any kind and wasn't sympathetic to either side in the Civil War. This pacifism was controversial and in the end the backlash was such that he fled to England, eventually settling in Devon.
Smith-Cameron is a wonderfully heartfelt here, and unlike her many predecessors, resists turning Juno into a saintly Madonna figure. Instead, she's warmhearted and sharp-witted, and you can understand too how she would have fallen for the scoundrel she ended up with. For O'Casey, women were always the heroes, they kept food on the table and the show on the road while the men were mostly either useless or vainglorious.
Rylance breaks new ground too with his 'Captain' Boyle. He plays him for High Comedy. With his tiny moustache and whimsical air, often bursting into song, he's no growling patriarch but rather a little man, in every sense. A total wastrel who'd blow the family's last penny in the pub, hanging out with his ingratiating sidekick Joxer (Paul Hilton). Like the neighbor's dog hanging round the kitchen table waiting for falling scraps, Joxer embodies the toadying sycophant. Carefully agreeing with the Captain, even when the latter contradicts himself in his daft ramblings. It's hilarious to watch but O'Casey's point was serious. This is the dehumanising toll of grinding poverty on the human spirit. Everyone in this house is on the make, simply trying to survive.
Rylance and Hilton are sublime in the famous sausage-frying scene. With Juno safely gone off to work, Joxer is re-admitted for breakfast. The antics, when they think she has returned, achieve a level of physical comedy to match the best of Abbott and Costello.
The setting is a teeming tenement house with no privacy, once the grand Georgian mansions of the gentry, now packed with families, cramped typically into two rooms. Rob Howell's design is true to the required naturalism of O'Casey but beautifully enhances it too. The witty reveal of Act Two sees the Boyle's spartan living room transformed with beautifully judged 'fine furniture', which has all been purchased on tick, on the expectation of a payout from a legacy.
The three leads (whose accents are spot-on) are supported by an excellent Irish ensemble cast. Among them the lanky Chris Walley (from TV's The Young Offenders) perfect as Mr Bentham, the cad who leads Mary astray, while Aisling Kearns is another wonderfully forceful O'Casey heroine as Mary. Anna Healy has the joy of playing the blowsy neighbor Mrs Madigan, who utters my favorite line when the Captain attempts to add some water to her whiskey to slow her down: Ah Jaysus, Johnny, don't dhrown it
, sez she.
