Juno and the Paycock
October, 1984 at the Little Theatre,
Colston Hall, Bristol
The New Bristol Theatre Company presents
JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK
by
Sean O’Casey
CAST
Mary Boyle - Mandy Langston
Johnny Boyle - Robin Seavill
Juno Boyle - Beryl Phillpotts
Jerry Devine - Michael Harris
Captain Jack Boyle - Mike Lockett
Joxer Daly - Eric Turner
Sewing Machine Man - Liam Chase-Hine
Coal-Block Vendor - Martin Anderson
Charles Bentham - Roger Tunstall
Maisie Madigan - Marlene Whyment
Mrs Tancred - Margaret Crowhurst
1st Neighbour - Jill Reeves
2nd Neighbour - Alison McLean
Needle Nugent - Don Phillpotts
IRA Mobiliser - Rob Hall
1st Removal Man - Pete Carlyon
2nd Removal Man - Tony Robinson
IRA Irregular - Martin Anderson
PS
I saw John (Morse) Thaw on stage once, playing the Australian reporter Wagner in the original run of Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day opposite Diana Rigg, and of course he was brilliant, but quite how brilliant I didn’t realise until I had to do something similar myself. He was having to talk in an accent for two and a half hours. Now maybe it’s all down to professionalism and technique and practice making perfect and all that, but in Juno and the Paycock we all had to put on Irish accents, and it is tough to sustain that kind of imposture for that length of time. You have to watch yourself every minute. Luckily one of the cast had an Irish friend who came in and gave us a few coaching sessions to avoid some of the more horrible potential pitfalls. And of course I didn’t have a fraction of the job Mr Thaw did – I spent half the play in bed behind a curtain and the other half looking miserable and crippled. I only had one arm in this one too, and whereas in the panto Swords and Sorcery a couple of years later I disguised the lopped limb by hiding it in my tunic (where it just made me look podgy), in Juno I chose to shove my hand down the front of my trousers under a loose tatty jumper. You tell me which was the more effective, the colostomy bag or the enormous elephant dong? All I know is, on both occasions I certainly ended up with a very hot arm.
I say the accent thing was a new experience, but I had gone through something like it before. As part of my Mod Langs university course we were encouraged to spend our third year as a teaching assistant abroad. I was posted to Göttingen in Germany and very early on decided that something had to be done about my accent. I spoke then with a broad Bristol burr, which worked well for putting across funny songs in folk clubs, but I could hardly expect these bright-eyed and eager young sixth-formers to understand me unless I tried to at least approximate the kind of PR accent they were being taught. So I chose my favourite British newsreader and started from day one to speak like him. I thought, if I’m going to make such a profound change, this is the best possible time to do it, when I’m far away from everyone who knows me and no one can call me out on it. I spent the next ten months speaking in this quasi-posh accent until it became second nature, and now I’ve spent twice as long sounding like a newsreader than I ever did speaking like a Bedminster schoolboy.
Meanwhile here I was having to unlearn that fake accent and start learning another one to play poor crippled Johnny Boyle. Luckily I didn’t have a lot to say, though I managed to get two good laughs during the course of the run, one inappropriate and the other rather cheeky, but it was a dour enough play and I felt the thing could so with a bit of leavening. The inappropriate one came when my mother was ushering me to bed behind the curtain. I had on these great authentic period hobnail boots, and as I went to climb up on the bed the combination of these nails and the rake of the Little Theatre stage nearly sent me skidding down towards the stalls. My hidden hand jerked involuntarily inside my trousers (see above) which must have looked hugely suspicious to any audience member focused on my flies at that point. The naughty laugh came when tea was being handed round to the family. I was standing upstage looking morose and someone handed me a saucer with my cup of tea on it. I stood there with my only viable hand fully occupied, looking in disbelief after the person who served me, so much as to say “How the hell do you expect me to drink this?” All right, so it’s not quite The Blood Donor, but I think the people who noticed it enjoyed the moment.
I should also pay tribute to the crew for trying to ease my sufferings on stage. At one point – I think it was shortly before I get dragged out to be executed or something (it was a very political play and I’m a bit vague on the details now) – I had to stand for a while by the fire stage left gazing sadly into the flames. Though masked from the audience, it was open into the wings (the red glow created by a heating lamp), and as I hunched there reflecting on fallen friends and lost comrades, a few members of the stage crew held up a hastily assembled montage of two models from page 3 of the Sun to try and cheer me up and remind me that life wasn’t so bad after all. Actually, the bastards were just trying to make me corpse and ruin the mood, but by now I was far too practised a thesp to succumb to such crude tricks as this. I simply gave my scrotum a quick tweak with my concealed hand and that was quite enough to refocus my thoughts, and even bring a genuine tear to my eye. But it was a nice gesture all the same and I made sure to thank them within an inch of their lives once the curtain had fallen.
The actual artwork the stage crew made available to me to help ease my sufferings as I stood staring one-handed into the fake fire. It almost worked.