Juno and the Paycock
Just when you think Mark Rylance had Mark Rylance-d all he can, the man finds whole new ways to Mark Rylance. I’d be intrigued to know what Succession star J Smith-Cameron was expecting when she signed on to play the eponymous hard bitten wife and mother in Sean O’Casey’s classic 1924 drama set in the tenements of Civil War Dublin. Was she entirely clear about the extent to which human special effect Rylance would upstage her and, indeed, everyone else?
While Matthew Warchus’s revival of Juno and the Paycock is grounded in realism, Rylance’s take on Juno’s drunken layabout husband ‘Captain’ Jack Boyle is coming from someplace entirely different.
Presumably inspired by a throwaway line mentioning Charlie Chaplin – a startling reference to a glamourous world beyond the violence gripping Dublin at the time – Rylance has gone full vaudevillian. Looking for all the world like the shambolic Irish cousin of Chaplin’s Little Tramp, he rocks a toothbrush moustache, a penchant for dazzling extremes of physical business, and a tendency to directly address the audience or look bewildered out of the corners of his eyes as if he can’t work out why he’s trapped in a play. For the first half he’s so dazzlingly strange and doing so much more than anyone else – much of it inscrutable – that it’s hard to focus on the other actors.
I found it brilliantly, bizarrely funny, the sort of auteur performance that no other actor alive would so much as think of giving. I suspect reviews will be divided
