Juno and the Paycock

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 939, 9 August 1957, Page 6

Juno and the Paycock

HE mixture of farce and tragedy, : foolishness, compassion and bitterness that is Ireland has rarely found better expression than in the plays of Sean O’Casey, and among these, most memorably in Juno and the Paycock. On August 18, ZB Sunday Showcase will present this play of Dublin tenement life in the time of "the troubles" of 1922. In the chaos-or chassis as the Paycock calls it-of the fighting between the Free-Staters and the Diehards, the women suffer, and the Juno of the title, Mrs Boyle, is the archtype of Irish motherhood just as Hecuba in her grief and anguish stood for the women of Troy. She states her position simply enough: "I'd like to know how a body’s not to mind these things; look at the way they’re afther leavin’ the people in this very house. Hasn’t the whole house, nearly, been massacred? There’s young Mrs Dougherty’s husband with his leg ; Mrs Travers that had her son blew be a mine in Inchegeela,-in County _Cork; Mrs Mannin’ that lost wan of her sons in an ambush a few weeks ago, an’ now, poor Mrs Tancred’s only child gone west with his body made a collandher of. Sure, if it’s not our busi- -~ I don’t know whose. business it — And this is while Juno still believes in the unexpected legacy which is to restore the family fortunes. It is before her daughter is betrayed, before her son, who has already lost an arm, is sent for and shot as a traitor to his cause. It is before her vain and braggart husband ("sthruttin? about from mornin’ till night like a paycock"’) is proved as worthless as his associates, as feckless and as time-serving as Joxer, his butty from an an upstairs attic. Then Juno, already old before her time with work and worry, rises above her accumulated woes to become an absolute and timeless character; her final conjuration, at the end of the play, reminded the critic Alan Dent of Shaw’s St. Joan asking the whole world when it will be ready to receive God’s Saints. "Blessed Virgin, where were you when me darlin’ son was riddled with bullets. + » . Sacred Heart o’ Jesus, take away eur hearts o’ stone, and give us hearts ©’ flesh! Take away this murdherin’ hate, an’ give us Thine own eternal love!" This is the elemental human tragedy, -and yet, against almost all of the rules, Juno and the Paycock consists largely of what James Agate called "gorgeous ‘and incredible fooling." O’Casey dedicated one of his plays "To the Gay Laugh of my Mother at the Gate of the Grave," and this that

there is a great deal of light in the workaday life brings laughter into all his best work. Here, in the second act the gaiety of the party is halted by the funeral procession of Robbie Tancred, and although the light, the mockery and the happiness return, just as the party does, in a way, pick up again, that moment of tragedy has left its mark, spreading the shadow of mortality across the bright and careless lives. The tragedy is not the less noble because it is expressed in low Dublin dialect instead of lofty poetry, and in this production the spell of an essentially poetic language is magnificently cast by the Irish voices. Cyril Cusack has assembled his actors from the Dublin theatres, mainly from the Abbey Theatre. Siobhan McKenna (pronounced Shee-vaun, and meaning "white spirit" in Gaelic), whose recent starring roles have included a sensational St Joan in London and a brilliant companion in The Chalk Garden on Broadway, graduated from the Abbey Theatre, as did

Seamus Kavanagh, a Programme Director of Radio Eireann, who has acted on the Irish stage and in films. Cyril Cusack himself has an international ‘re- " putation as a producer and actor, from the Abbey Theatre to Hollywood. Maire Kean, Maureen Cusack, May Craig and Harry Brogan are all from the Abbey Theatre, in whose School Leo Leyden was trained; although he acts with other companies. The Abbey Theatre has not only been the background for most of the cast, but it is in the background of the play itself, which was first performed there in 1924. By this time the Abbey Theatre had established itself as practically synonymous with Irish theatre. Before its foundation in 1904 the Irish Dramatic Movement was presenting plays by native writers with amateur actors, and it was a visit to London by these actors that moved Miss A. E. Horniman to give the actors a theatre of their own. This theatre has won and main-

tained a world-wide reputation for performances of a rather specialised nature -being almost exclusively national in its repertory. The beginnings were stormy, the Irish audiences frequently rising in*near-riots. For example, J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, the Abbey’s first great success, was bitterly attacked. The idea that the western peasantry could make a murderer into a hero was taken as an attack on Irish character, and some robust passages of humour were considered as a slur on Irish chastity. But the Abbey Theatre then as always refused the censorship of the mob, being independent of the boxoffice and popular control. "We went on giving the people what we thought good until it became popular,’ Lady Gregory has said. The other prime mover, W. B. Yeats, wanted the

theatre to be "an intensely poetical and symbolic creation which would charge the ancient Gaelic myths with new meanings." Their chief principles were the native tradition and realism in dialogue, drawing on the rich texture of the living speech. Within the first 10 years the mood changed, with newer dramatists writing original and clearsighted plays, ranging in mood and subject but turning more and more to the hard fight of the Irish peasantry and the dull grind of the Irish townsman. The Abbey became a popular realistic theatre, exploiting the comedy and tragedy of everyday life, and so it remained. Nevertheless, something of the original intention survived. Yeats continued to be a director until his death in 1939, and in playwrights like Sean O’Casey, who were at first sight uncompromisingly "realist," there was often a strong undercurrent of poetry. Indeed, Sean O’Casey said that no one "who hasn’t a quivering fibre of poetry in him can write a fine play." He himself first approached the Abbey Theatre in 1923, when the directors refused his play The Crimson in the Tricolour. He countered with another play, about the Rebellion, The Shadow of a Gunman, which was produced with great success. Less than a year late Juno and the Paycock was playing to crowded houses. The Plough and the Stars equalled its success in?

« 1926, but two _ years later The Silver Tassie was refused, and Sean O’Casey withdrew from the Abbey. Since then he has written . further experimental plays,

changing his earlier style of satiric tragedy to what is far more stylised and symbolic, and far more difficult for the audience to follow. He had _ also written critical and autobiographical books, in a rich and artificial prose. In these he has told the story of his life from his early years as a Protestant in Dublin to his final retirement to Devon in England. Born in 1884, the youngest in a poor family, he had a bitterly hard boyhood. Books, somehow available in abundance, were denied him by the state of his aching, ulcerated eyes, which have always given him trouble. When he was finally able ‘to read, literature rivalled Ireland in his affections. For by then Dublin life had driven out all British allegiance, and O’Casey was a whole-hearted Nationalist, passionately involved in the turmoil of Irish factions. When in his late thirties he began to write as well as read, his early plays established him as a master of comedy and pathos on the grand scale, native in idiom and universal in theme. In a recent article in the Radio Times, O’Casey wrote that every dramatist should aim at "the plays that influence the mind and the emotions, however brief their appearance on the stage. Some say, I believe, that the theatre of the future will be an intellectual one. I don’t think so. . . Intellect can never banish emotion from the theatre, for emotion is deep within us and round us everywhere; we feel it, see it, and hear it always; it is in the sight of the first rose of late spring and the last rose of summer; it is in the sight of the cradle and the coffin; in the wind and the rain; in the stone of Salisbury Cathedral and the steel and glass of Radio Centre building; in the sound of a Beethoven symphony and the monotonous and insistent beat of the Rock ’n’ Roll; and it is in these things and in all others because it is deep’ in the human heart and forever active in the human mind... ' "Be the effort a success or failure, I aim, as I have always aimed, at bringing emotion and imagination on to the

stage, in the shapes of song, dance, dialogue and scene; each mingling with the other, as life does, for life is never rigid (except in political parties, respectable families, and old-fashioned schools like Eton and Harrow); nothing changes so often, so inevitably in city and country, in field, factory, workshop and home. The best of dramatists throughout a long life can but get a glimpse of it, and this glimpse is confined to the life and chronicle of his time. And he can catch this glimpse only if his eyes are ever watching and his

waite ears ever open to catch the merest whisper. "We shouldn’t be afraid of the fane iciful, for it is a gay part of life. . . iThere is a deal of fancy in (my) plays i. . and when you hear them... you can, if you wish, look back in anger iat the plays or look forward in hope towards a newer and braver theatre. ‘Whether you like the plays or not, whether they be good or bad in your mind, they have one good thing about them-they were the best that I could do."