Here’s a dose of mighty tasty West End casting for these darkening October nights. Acting royalty Mark Rylance pairs with American actress J Smith-Cameron, best known as the Roy family’s loyal-ish retainer Gerri in Succession , for Seán O’Casey’s Irish masterpiece of a tragicomedy, a rollicking play that celebrates its centenary this year. We’re in the tenement slum dwellings of Dublin – designer Rob Howell’s ragged, intricate set is spot-on – and the Irish Civil War rages outside, and occasionally inside, these grimy windows.
Against a constant drip-feed of news of young men dying and being maimed, O’Casey paints a picture of ebullient poverty liberally doused in whisky and singing, and the mood inside the Boyle family rooms is, initially at least, one of levity. Paterfamilias “Captain” Jack Boyle (Rylance) is a carousing wastrel of a charismatic strutting “paycock”, a man who works exceedingly hard at avoiding a job. He is joined in his roistering alcoholic japes by friend “Joxer” Daly (Paul Hilton); an amusing visual gag has Jack too wide for his waistcoat while Joxer is too long for his trousers.
The emotional, moral and financial mainstay of the family is Jack’s quietly fearsome wife Juno (Smith-Cameron); one withering stare from her is enough to send Joxer scarpering. She’s protective of morose adult son Johnny (Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty), who lost an arm in the Easter Rising and whose plaintive cry is, “Haven’t I done enough for .
