Word: paycock
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Sean O'Casey is the author of Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, many another realistically wild Irish play about the lives of Ireland's poor. Less successful is this "autobiography," which covers only the first twelve years of his life. Gist: "Well, he'd learned poethry and had kissed a girl ... if he hadn' gone into the house, he had knocked at the door...
...Mareen Delany and May Craig are splendid as a pair of garrulous, short-tempered kind-hearted fishwives, the latter singing "Rule Brittania" throughout the uprising. All these people and several others comprise an intensely interesting gallery of figures, but the play suffers, and compares unfavorably with "June and the Paycock," through having no character of great tragic proportions...
Sean O'Casey's "The Plough and the Stars," to be performed the rest of this week, concludes the engagement of the Abbey Theatre Players in Boston. Strongly resembling "June and the Paycock," it is a still grimmer indictment of war, a more tragic display of how human values are broken and lost when men die for a cause. The setting is the Easter uprising of 1916. It is again a woman who tries to salvage something from the torrent of destruction, but this time she falls and ends in madness. No one wins anything, in fact, except that...
...Juno and the Paycock" again stimulates Boston audiences with its candid humor soon lost in trenchant satire and irony, and capped by unmitigated and all-pervasive tragedy. Sean O'Casey has chosen 1922 for his grim picture, when much of the actual fighting in Ireland was over, but men were known for their deeds and their sympathies. He sets up a family from the slums of Dublin, and through them he lashes at principles stubbornly adhered to only because they are principles, the folly of romantic and aimless sacrifice, the spirit of brotherly love and humanity that fails as soon...
...Carolan takes over the role of "Captain" Jack Boyle, the tawdry "paycock," and superbly prevents the depravity of his role from becoming lost in its amusing elements. The latter are dangerously prominent, since the first act of the tragedy is pure comedy. Eileen Crowe is superb for the role of "Juno" Boyle, who receives her divinely regal name for the internal reason that everything in her life happened in June, but for dramatic reasons less fortuitous. F. J. McCormick has created his part of "Joxer" Daly, the fawning hanger-on and salve to the Captain's petty pride...