Juno and the Paycock

Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, 2016

In Wellington in 1976, newly formed Circa Theatre staged Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock. Having been involved in an earlier production of the play, Richard Campion enthusiastically offered to direct a four-week season of Juno. The Circa production showcased some of New Zealand's finest actors, including several with Irish connections, and it ingeniously used the theatre space to involve the audience and underline elements in the setting. The production emphasised aspects of the play which were important to O'Casey: the people, the drama, and the humour; and it pointed out the universality of his dramatic situation and his characters' experiences. Campion's programme note reveals that he was mindful of parallels between Dublin in 1922 and Belfast in 1976, and Circa's Juno played to a New Zealand audience aware of the brutal realities of the civil conflict taking place half the globe away.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SOCIAL SCIENCES & HUMANITIES

This paper deals with the predicament of women in the narrow-minded Irish society of earlier twentieth century Ireland, the researcher in this paper sheds light on the oppression of women, their sufferings, the malfunctioned society and the mistaken views about the woman. Moreover, the researcher delineates women’s issues in the work environment, exploitation and other domestic pressures and concludes that women can succeed and achieve victory by being unconventional. The play that the researcher has selected for this paper is Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey, the play that offers the best revolutionary examples of the female characters Juno and her daughter Mary. The paper uses feminist criticism for the analysis.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SOCIAL SCIENCES & HUMANITIES, 2022

This paper deals with the predicament of women in the narrow-minded Irish society of earlier twentieth century Ireland, the researcher in this paper sheds light on the oppression of women, their sufferings, the malfunctioned society and the mistaken views about the woman. Moreover, the researcher delineates women's issues in the work environment, exploitation and other domestic pressures and concludes that women can succeed and achieve victory by being unconventional. The play that the researcher has selected for this paper is Juno and the Paycock by Sean O'Casey, the play that offers the best revolutionary examples of the female characters Juno and her daughter Mary. The paper uses feminist criticism for the analysis.

East–West Cultural Passage, 2019

This article examines how Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, written in 1924, anticipated the postmodern conception of gender, or more accurately, the postmodern deconstruction of gender as merely repetitive patterns of behavior. The focus is on how the play dramatizes the Foucauldian notion of the death of man in the neurotic and irresponsible behavior of the male characters. Taking the psychological vertical approach in the analysis, the article adds to the scholarly work that has been written about the play, which mostly focused on its sociopolitical and religious aspects. The analysis this article sets forth shows how O'Casey's representation (or perhaps mal-representation) of male characters was symptomatic of the cultural upsurge that later came to be known as postmodernism. In so doing, the article makes a curious link between O'Casey's representation of neurotic men and the more recent inception of postmodernism and its deconstruction of gender. This link, in other words, is between neurosis and deconstruction, between psychological disturbances and the much-celebrated postmodern theory that came later. Thus, the article concludes with the peculiar question of how much of postmodern thought was, albeit unconsciously, predicated upon psychological degeneration, especially when it comes to its deconstruction of gender dynamics.

The Beckett Circle, 2009

Theatre Journal, 2008

Indian Literature, 2017

Review of The Collected Plays of J P Das

2008

1997

Brigitte and Jean Massin, editors, in their Histoire de la Musique Occidentale, explain in details that musical period in England. We will only retain a few remarks. First a definition by Thomas Morley, that we only have in French. The madrigal is: “la forme la plus subtile et la plus délicieuse pour un homme de bon entendement. (...) La musique en doit être indécise comme le vent, parfois lascive et parfois languissante, parfois grave et solennelle, à d’autres temps, efféminée. (...) Vous pouvez y montrer l’extrême de la variété, et plus de variété vous montrerez, plus vous recueillerez d’estime.” (Brigitte and Jean Massin, op cit, Vol I, p. 215) And they go on explaining the great importance of music in Shakespeare’s and Ben Jonson’s plays. What we have done in this article is a demonstration that Shakespeare pushed the music a long way beyond simple notes and songs, simple measures and instruments, and developed it into the text, the language, the very dramatic situation. Shakespeare is thus a musician of the language and the dramatic stage.

2016

This chapter examines productions of Beckett’s work at Dublin’s Focus Theatre, a seventy-two-seat venue that was part of Dublin’s cultural fabric until it closed in 2012. I home in on Focus’s own staging of Happy Days in the early 1970s, in addition to productions of Waiting for Godot by Oscar and Taboo theatre companies in 1985 and 1991 respectively, both of which the Focus Theatre hosted. These productions garnered much critical attention at the time when they were staged; however, they have remained – like the Focus itself – underexplored within Irish theatre history. Looking at specific Irish productions of Beckett’s plays from the early 1970s to the early 1990s allows us to excavate the ways in which mythologies have been built around Beckett’s work concerning, for example, how we can or should ‘do’ Beckett in terms of performance techniques, casting, place, space and relative to issues of cultural identity. Examining these productions can shed further light on Ireland’s changi...