From the moment the curtain rises on Francis O'Connor's soaring box set, faithful to the minutiae of Sean O'Casey's stage directions, it is clear that this production is intent on paying homage to the 75th anniversary of the play by a careful, loving backward glance.
Garry Hynes has assembled a nigh-perfect cast and they do play well. As is her wont, she makes the detail sparkle. Each role, minor or major, is executed with superb fidelity. Pat Leavy brings to Mrs Tancred a dignity that both controls and elevates the emotions of bereavement; Cillian Murphy captures the terror and the self-immolation of Johnny's egotism; David Wilmot conveys both Gerry Devine's basic decency and his ultimate priggishness, as he detaches from the shamed Mary.
One can sense the time that has been lavished on the direction of these roles. (If the furniture men and Irregulars seem neglected: what odds? They are small fry in the drama.) Only Brid Brennan's Maisie Madigan seems adrift, most noticeably in the party scene, where she is hard to place, (an exotic flight of fancy that does not quite come off); less so when she turns shivering termagant in search of her blankets.
The production is marked by its capacity to draw the laughter from the text - this is as it should be for Juno is a great comic masterpiece - and also to manage those risky switches to the solemn and the tragic. The tenement rebounds with raised voices and slammed doors and yet Hynes draws out the quiet moments.
The curve of the performance brings us from laughter and light to the closing gloom (aided by Mick Hughes's lighting).
The principals are magnificent but they also point to the weight of theatre history that has encrusted the play. Michael Gambon's Paycock is a shambling, loose-limbed waster. His sheer stage presence recalls Peter O'Toole's starry but flawed Boyle; his vocal range gives full vent to the rhythm and flow of the lines. He misses the sense of real danger that lurked in Donal McCann's performance.
John Kavanagh's Joxer is an absorbing foil to Gambon but this is a reprieve of his Gate Joxer. He looks the same, he is more comfortable in the role and, despite the sandpapery rasp, has less of the rodent than was in evidence earlier.
Marie Mullen is a fine Juno in the vein of Siobhan McKenna but with a stronger sense of the tenement environment (she is an extremely loud-spoken, raucous woman) and with the acumen to down-play Juno's final, searing speech.
The trouble with all this is that it is too reassuring. Hynes does not do enough to shake our complacency, as she did so daringly with her Abbey Plough. Until, that is, she comes to the last scene but one. Here the staging - mother and daughter and neighbour - has the riveting stillness of a tableau. The lines are delivered with a simplicity shorn of rhetoric and the bare room is left an empty symbol of desolation - a moment of theatrical brilliance. If only there were more of that breath-catching originality.
Runs for three weeks. To book phone 01-6771717.
