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 on whether it makes any sense in the wider context of the production. But you know, if somebody offered me a Picasso I wouldn’t fret that it didn’t go with the furniture.
And while showman director Warchus is perhaps not able to articulate this perfectly, Rylance’s turn does make sense in the context of the devastating change of tack O’Casey’s play makes late on. For three quarters of its running time Juno and the Paycock functions as a boisterous society comedy about the ludicrous Jack inheriting a fortune from a distant, disliked cousin. The war is alluded to, but barely noticed. But in the final furlong the family’s improbable hijinks are ripped to shreds as a series of terrible but far-from-unlikely calamities overtake them. Rylance’s early performance is as a man who can barely believe any of this is happening – by the hauntingly deranged final scene he’s not casting cute looks at the audience any more.
The pitch into seriousness aids the rest of the cast. It’s not that the likes of Aisling Kearns as Jack’s straitlaced daughter Mary or Paul Hilton as his opportunistic best friend Joxer aren’t good. But up against Rylance’s showy weirdness they’re simply not on an equal footing, the Spiders from Mars to his Ziggy Stardust. But that changes as things get darker, and Smith-Cameron in particular finally gets her moment with a biblical late monologue.
There will definitely be those who think Rylance has totally overstepped the mark here, but sometimes I think we’re a bit precious about allowing for genuinely weird, virtuosic acting in classic plays. At the end of the day, Mark Rylance gotta Mark Rylance.
