Reviewing the premiere of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock in 1925, critic James Agate famously deemed it “as much a tragedy as Macbeth, although it is a tragedy taking place in the Porter’s family.” Shakespearean ambition is readily apparent in Garry Hynes’s staging of DruidO’Casey, a mammoth transformation of Juno and two other famous Dublin-tenement melodramas into a unified epic aiming to deliver universal and even existential truths. And deliver them it does, thrillingly; particularly when the Irish import is taken in at NYU’s Skirball Center during a full-day marathon, in its 6½-hour entirety. (Which one can do twice more, on the 11th and 14th of this month.)
O’Casey’s later career transitioned into Expressionistic and even heavily symbolic pathways: A main character in his 1949 Cock-a-Doodle Dandy is a man-sized dancing rooster symbolizing the Life Force. So the author’s ideas and stagecraft, across an extraordinary 50-year career, are certainly amenable to unconventional presentation.
That said, the plays that make up DruidO’Casey are traditionally offered in full naturalistic detail; to many, the plays virtually demand kitchen-sink realism. Hynes – a Tony winner for The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and Druid Theater artistic director – and set designer Francis O’Connor were thus taking a big risk in replacing the expected box sets with large wooden panels configured in multiple ways, placing all the action in a black-box void and allowing characters, when appropriate, to move down center and soliloquize.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
But just as in Ivo van Hove’s admirably stark take on A View From the Bridge, the stripping away of virtually all realistic furniture and props can bring out layered qualities, including ritualistic and incantatory elements, too often lost amidst sentimental storytelling. I found nothing sentimental in DruidO’Casey, just great swaths of emotional impact.
Seen in one gulp, the marathon is organized in chronological order of the events that serve as each play’s backdrop. The Easter rising of 1916 is happening right outside the tenement windows of The Plough and the Stars, and eventually insinuates its way up the stairs to wreak havoc on participants and bystanders alike. The author’s view of the uprising as a profound mistake that would lead directly to civil war comes through crystal clear in Hynes’ staging, even as it acknowledges the nobility vain causes can inspire. The climactic scene between a young bride driven mad by the loss of her husband and baby, and the fiercely pro-British widow who nevertheless brings her succor, is set against James F. Ingalls’ blood-red lighting of the fire of war that burns everyone in its path.
The middle piece of what has come to be called the “Dublin Trilogy,” The Shadow of a Gunman, is the shortest and slightest, bordering on farce. During the 1920 War of Independence, a neurotic poet (whom everyone in the tenement thinks is an IRA marksman) and his flatmate, a cynical salesman, are caught flat-footed when a real IRA operative leaves a valise filled with Mills bombs for British soldiers to find. Romantic assignation and drunken revelry barge into this fraught situation, yet even here, Hynes and O’Connor execute an 11th hour stagecraft coup to highlight a young girl’s hopeless, tragic sacrifice.
And then there’s Juno, one of the 20th century’s indisputable masterpieces, setting the highs and lows of the misery-laden Boyle family against the 1922 civil war. Not since Falstaff, perhaps, has the stage welcomed a poltroon quite the size of “Captain Jack,” the “paycock” with a genius for hypocritical self-aggrandizement. The Falstaffian glee of Jack’s hopes of a huge inheritance is broken when a grieving mother keens in a procession for her murdered son. And when the inheritance falls through and everything Jack has amassed is taken away, the stage picture smacks of King Lear’s heath, on which Jack and his acolyte Joxer – stunningly played by Rory Nolan and Aaron Monaghan, respectively – could be sketches for the tramps of Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett being another Irishman with an eye and ear for comedy in the face of bleak despair).
The acting company is so strong, so tightly calibrated, that singling anyone out seems unfair, but several of the double acts make an indelible impression. Monaghan puts delightfully different spins on weaselly rascals in Plough and Juno – one self-deceiving, one sly – while Caitríona Ennis executes a love-starved ingenue in Gunman and Juno’s bawdy widow with equal brio. Sophie Lenglinger is heartbreaking as the destroyed young bride in Plough, while Hilda Fay invests Captain Jack’s long-suffering wife Juno with unforgettable strength even when all is lost. Which of us could ask more of ourselves?
DruidO’Casey: Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy opened October 4, 2023, at the NYU Skirball Center and runs through October 14. Tickets and information: nyuskirball.org
