Juno and the Paycock

Abbey Theatre, Dublin until Nov 5 7.30pm (Sat mat 2pm) 13-40 01-8787222 abbeytheatre.ie

“What is the stars?” enquires the idiosyncratic and largely drunk philosopher Capt Jack Boyle in Sean O’Casey’s 1924 drama. It is a question to which this co-production between the Abbey Theatre and the National Theatre of Great Britain gives a categorical answer: Ciarán Hinds and Sinead Cusack is the stars.

If that seems like an unimaginative response, but one furnished with reassuringly glossy production values, it pretty much sums up director Howard Davies’s production. A superb Irish cast and a sensitive British director have taken on O’Casey’s arch and ribald tragi-comedy – one that ought to have more than a trace of sulphur – and serviced it with a production so polite and polished it wouldn’t look out of place in a display case.

It's a shame, because Juno,enduringly popular and still trenchantly aware of the gap between high-minded idealism and grubby reality, deserves more than an expensively realised depiction of tenement squalor if it is to engage us as something more than a scuffed piece of heritage drama.

There are still moments in this raw play that break free from the lacquer: the steel of Clare Dunne’s Mary, the daring lick of absurdism that concludes the action. But the edges have largely been sawn off, as though the co-producers were worried about offending Dublin or London audiences. O’Casey never had that problem.

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