by Rose Rushe
ACTOR/ director John A Murphy had his 2013 production ‘What Happened Bridgie Cleary’ (Bottom Dog Theatre Company) make it to the Irish Times Theatre Awards with a Best Actress nomination for Joanne Ryan.
This year he takes towards another Irish play spiked with bloodymindedness, ‘Juno and The Paycock’ by Sean O’Casey.
Quarry Players is the company to stage this classic at 69 O’Connell Street from Tuesday March 11 to Saturday 15, 8pm (booking for this Limerick Arts Encounter feature is managed at www.limetreetheatre.ie)
It’s Murphy’s seventh outing with Quarry as director.
This is a landmark political play of an emerging Ireland, a boisterous sprawl set within the Boyle family– mother Juno, her paycock Captain Boyle – and neighbours. “It appears in some ways quite small but when you start to pick around it, it acquires depth of hidden proportion”.
Do not forget that it is set in 1922, year of the Civil War and post Angl0-Irish treaty. This was when legacy terms such as The Free State and the Six Counties were forged. Dublin and indeed, Ireland, was in a ferment and ‘Juno and the Paycock’s is the second of O’Casey’s trilogy and treatment of same years of tumult, 1916 on. *
John Anthony Murphy hates that on occasion this eloquent, revealing script has been played for laughs: “‘Juno and the Paycock is a ferocious play, an attack of our inhumanity to humanity. We hear of the deaths of children in people’s homes…look at the roles of men and how they behave. The strength and dignity and hopes for humanity lie in the women”.
With a dozen cast in tenement Dublin, Paul McCarthy has another big part with Capt Boyle; Michelle Flanagan his spouse “and I think she will carry the difficulty of Juno well”; Kevin Kiely is Mr Bentham the rogue solicitor, Meg Hennessy his sweetheart Mary; Zeb Moore, a Dublin native, is Joxer.
Book in advance at www.limetreetheatre.ie
*The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) ; The Plough and The Stars (1926).
