[In the following review of the debut of Juno & the Paycock at the Abbey Theatre, Jewell lauds O'Casey's “unique” interpretation of life in the Dublin slums, especially the authenticity of his characters that surpass cliches of the Irish peasantry.]

The Abbey Theater, Dublin, is a somber little playhouse, rather bleak, and crude in equipment; yet it has brought to light some of the most notable works of modern dramatic art. The late John M. Synge, W. B. Yeats, Padraic Colum, Lady Gregory, Seumas O'Kelly, Lord Dunsany have sat in the stalls to watch their own premiers; while from it, a few seasons ago, issued the company which toured America with Lennox Robinson's “The Whiteheaded Boy.” I doubt, however, whether any piece has been seen at the Abbey finer than “June[sic] and the Paycock.” The week of its production literary Dublin talked of little else. Mr. Yeats, Lennox Robinson, Æ were in agreement as to its high and impartial fidelity; and Lady Gregory (who, being one of the directors of the theater, had read [Juno and the Paycock] in manuscript) journeyed all the way from her home in the west of Ireland to see it performed. James Stephens said of the play that “it is plumped like an orange, full of sap.” One of the local dramatic critics gave as his opinion: “Mr. O'Casey is the nearest approach to a genius we have had in Irish literature for the stage in a very considerable time.”

And this “genius” is a bricklayer's assistant, plying his trade from day to day. He could not attend a tea in the greenroom of the Abbey to which I was asked, because there wouldn't be time to wash the mortar off his hands and get into respectable garb. Sean O'Casey lives in a single room, furnished with a bed, a chair, a table, and a lamp. His passion is books. I learned what he did with his royalty receipts for the opening two weeks: got the cheque cashed immediately and went down to the second-hand bookshops along the quai, where he indulged in an orgy. As a child he begged in the streets for his food. Today he is able to eat only the plainest and most frugal fare, because his digestive organs have been ruined by starvation. Now that he is in the way of becoming famous, the attitude of his fellows in the bricklaying world has changed: they think him a snob. They do not know Sean O'Casey.

June [sic], far from being a Grecian goddess, is a woman of the Dublin slums, so nicknamed because she chanced to have been born in June; “paycock” is simply dialect for the bird of gorgeous tail plumage. The fact that this is a play about Dublin life makes it in a sense unique. With depictions of peasant character and manners, patrons of the Abbey have grown very familiar. It was left to a hod-carrier to give them the capital—not Dublin's gay and intellectual side, to be sure, but a cross-section, marvelously real, of its slums. Mr. O'Casey, who understands the people about whom he writes, knocks out a wall, and we behold the living apartment of a two-room tenement flat inhabited by the Boyle family.

It is a barren domicile—not so very different from his own, I fancy; just a few wooden chairs, a rough table, crazy curtains at the windows, and the walls presenting various strata of paper, tattered in spots, patched in others. A poor fire smolders on the hearth, where we see a kettle for tea and a pan containing a solitary sausage. On the mantelpiece an alarm clock reposes face downward, that being the only position in which it will function as a clock. Before a picture of the Virgin a small light burns.

The plot is simple. At times one feels it to be non-existent, and yet there is a plot. The play is expertly, if not in all respects flawlessly, put together. Its story is woven about the tragic figure of Johnny Boyle, the young son of the house, who in 1916 was a Republican, taking part in the Easter Week uprising where he lost an arm. Now he has become a Free Stater, and, shortly before the time in which the action begins (1922), has given some evidence against a former Republican comrade who, having failed to change his politics, is shot by soldiers of the Free State. Johnny cowers under an abject, disorganizing dread of the retribution he feels relentlessly closing in. The Republicans are on his track; he is a marked man. So long, he believes, as the little red flame is there before the Virgin's picture, harm cannot reach him. And in this superstition seems to reside a kind of terrible authenticity. The light burns on; but in the last act it flickers—it goes out. Two gunmen are at the door, their pistols leveled. Johnny Boyle is to go with them, no matter where or for what purpose. It is the end: another victim to the insatiate lust of civil warfare.

The author takes advantage, dramatically, of the death of the young Republican, for which Johnny is indirectly responsible, bringing the bereaved mother, in the second act, to the door of the Boyle flat, where she pauses on her way to the grave. “It's a sad journey we're goin' on,” sobs a woman who is with her, “but God is good, an' the Republic won't be always down.” Scant consolation this, however, proves.

mrs. tancred. Ah, what good is that to me now? Whether they're up or down won't bring me darlin' son back from the grave.

neighbor. Still an' all, he died a noble death, an' we'll bury him like a king.

mrs. tancred. Ah, what's the pains I suffered bringin' him into the world to carry him to his cradle, to the pains I'm sufferin' now, carryin' him out o' the world to bring him to his grave? … Mother o' God, Mother o' God, have pity! O blessed Virgin, where were you when me darlin' son was riddled with bullets? … Sacred heart of the Crucified Jesus, take away our hearts o' stone … an' give us hearts o' flesh. … Take away this murtherin' hate … an' give us Thine own eternal love!

It is a note of anguish destined to repetition, even in phrase; for although June Boyle, watching the funeral procession from a window, can mutter: “Maybe it's nearly time we had a little less respect for the dead, an' a little more respect for the livin',” yet, when her son's turn arrives, in a frenzy she lifts her hands to heaven and voices the same prayer: “Take away this murtherin' hate … an' give us Thine own eternal love!” The words drop like burning tears of agony—an agony so awful that, sitting there in the desolate dark of the theater, the wind coldly shaking the exit doors, the witnesses' heart is torn with pain and compassion. The debacle, in its poignancy unbearable almost is yet keyed to the noble elevation of Greek tragedy which, throughout, visits Sean O'Casey's play with the distinguishing mark of greatness.

June[sic] is described, in the author's manuscript, as a woman of forty-five. “Her face has assumed that look which ultimately settles down upon the faces of the working class: a look of listless monotony and harassed anxiety, blending with an expression of mechanical resistance.” It is she whose shoulders endure the weight of the household. Her son is shattered. Her husband will not work when he can possibly avoid it (though his mouth is full of brave talk). To Mary, the daughter, who has turned Socialist, June wearily replies:

Ah, wear whatever ribbon you like, girl, only don't be botherin' me. I don't know what a girl on strike wants to be wearin' a ribbon round her head for or silk stockin's on her legs either. It's wearin' them things that make the employers think they're givin' yous too much money.

Yes, life for June is neither smooth nor sweet. Yet there is a snatch of pseudo good-fortune ahead; for a “will,” purporting to leave to her husband, “Captain” Boyle, a snug sum of money, suddenly drops into the family lap. The facts behind that document are these: A certain school-teacher and amateur theosophist named Charlie Bentham (a man much higher in the social scale than the Boyles), has looked upon Mary and found her worthy his desire. By way of wooing—for in the Dublin slums it is not considered good form for a girl sunk in poverty to be courted by a man of affluence or position—Bentham represents himself as a legal ambassador authorized to handle the will (which he has fabricated). The Boyles are to be well off as soon as it becomes operative. Many succumbs at once, throwing over a lover of her stratum, Jerry Devine.

Old Man Boyle, flushed with the wine of this unexpected windfall, borrows right and left from his neighbors, so that no time may be lost in beginning to enjoy the legacy. He orders clothes from a tailor. New furnishings turn the flat into a gaudy abode: one with difficulty recognizes the tenement livingroom of former times when the curtain rises on the second act. Of course this eldorado lasts only long enough for Bentham to have his way with Mary and then, in the traditional fashion, to depart on other adventures, leaving her with child. Nemesis is fiendishly thorough. Creditors descend. The tailor confiscates “Captain” Boyle's prized new suit (not paid for). Movers denude the flat of its grandeur. Johnny is snatched by Republicans to his death—this once more emphasizing the background of political chaos: of murder, destruction, the violence of an age drunk and mad.

And yet, curiously enough, plentifully equipped, too, is this grim play with comedy, which in essence seems more heart-breaking than the outcome itself. “Captain” Boyle is at all times a tragi-comic figure, portrayed as

a man of about sixty-five, stout, gray-haired. His neck is short, and his head looks like a stone ball such as one sometimes sees on top of a gate-post. His cheeks, reddish-purple, are puffed out, as if he were always repressing an almost irrepressible ejaculation. He carries himself with the upper part of his body slightly thrust forward. His walk is a slow inconsequential strut. His clothes are dingy, and he wears a faded seaman's cap with a glazed peak.

Boyle's title, “Captain,” derives from his having once taken a trip in a collier from Dublin to Liverpool; but he likes to pose as a mighty man of the sea. We savor this legend in one of the dialogues between Boyle and his boon companion, “Joxer” Daly, whose face is “like a bundle of crinkled paper,” whose eyes hold a cunning twinkle, and who has “a habit of constantly shrugging.”

They sit together over the “Captain's” breakfast of sausage, while the voice of a coal vender is heard chanting outside in the street: “Blocks … coal blocks! Blocks … coal blocks!” This apparently starts a train of thought.

boyle. Them was days, Joxer, them was days! Nothin' was too hot or too heavy for me then. Sailin' from the Gulf o' Mexico to the Antartic Ocean. I seen things—I seen things, Joxer—that no mortal man should speak about that knows his Cathecism. Often an' often, when I was fixed to th' wheel with a marlinspike, an' the win's blowin' fierce, an' the waves lashin' till you'd think every minute was goin' to be your last, an' it blowed an' blowed—blow is the right word, Joxer, but blowed is what the sailors use—

joxer. Oh, it's a darlin' word, a daarlin' word!

boyle. An' as it blowed an' blowed, I often looked up at the sky an' assed meself the question: What is the stars? What is the stars?

voice of coal vender. Any blocks, coal blocks! Blocks, coal blocks!

joxer. Ah, that's the question, that's the question: What is the stars?

boyle. An' then, I'd have another look, an' I'd ass meself: What is the moon?

A wonderful scene, annihilating in its futility, its maudlin talk of stars and moon, with a coal vender crying his wares. It even held a sort of eerie beauty.

Then there is the joust in the second act, to celebrate the Boyles's turn of fortune. Impromptu songs are sung. Never to be forgotten is the duet from “Il Trovatore,” between mother and daughter: full of tremolos and uncertainties; full of a pride on June's part and of a shy girlish confusion on Mary's—for Bentham is present, and she must do herself justice. Finally, the gramophone is turned on. And it is this hilarious scene which is broken by Mrs. Tancred, with her prayer to the heart of the Crucified Jesus.

Light and shade are extraordinarily crocheted. The play is veritable growth of the soil: complete, unsparing, and true—like the performance. Sara Allgood as June, Barry Fitzgerald as the “Captain,” and F. J. McCormick as “Joxer,” lifted their roles to a plain of creation, with art that never once showed threadbare. The Johnny of Arthur Shields was a finely studied characterization; and I have never seen a more exquisite bit of work in the theater than Eileen Crowe's picture of Mary singing before her lover.

After the smash-up, “Captain” Boyle goes out with “Joxer” to drown his sorrows. It is these two unspeakable old cronies, returned at night to a room bereft of all save a smoky lamp, who conclude the piece:

boyle. If th' worst comes to th' worst, I'll join … a flyin' column! I did me bit in Easther Week—had no business to be there … but Captain Boyle's Captain Boyle!

joxer. Breathes there a man with soul so de—ad … this me—ow—n … me native … land!

boyle. Commandant Kelly … died in them arms, Joxer. “Tell me Volunteer butties,” says he, “that I … died for … Ireland!”

joxer. D'jever read Willy Reilly an' his Own Colleen Bawn?

boyle. I'm tellin' you, Joxer, th' whole worl's in a terrible state o' chassis!

joxer. Ah … it's a darlin' book! A daaarlin' … book!

The curtain mercifully intervenes; one could endure no more.