We forget that Michael Gambon is a Dublin-born actor. Now he returns to the Gaiety Theatre, where he made his professional debut, as "Captain" Boyle in Garry Hynes's all-star revival of O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock. It's a rich, physically inventive, exuberantly Gambonesque piece of acting, but I couldn't help agreeing with the veteran actress in front of me who said of the evening as a whole: "Fine individual performances but nothing much to do with each other."
O'Casey's play, set in the Boyle family's two-roomed segment of a Dublin tenement house caught in all its mouldering grandeur in Francis O'Connor's design, invites the highest comparisons. Seamus Heaney in the Faber edition invokes Shakespeare and claims that O'Casey's characters could hold their own with Falstaff in Cheapside. There is even something Shakespearean about the intersection of private lives and public events as the Boyles' son, Johnny, is killed by Republican die-hards as a traitor. And in the programme Anthony Cronin reminds us of O'Casey's debt to Dickens: a debt lovingly repaid in the epically truthful portraits of the strutting, self-deluding Jack Boyle, the slyly ingratiating Joxer and the heroically long-suffering Juno.
But the danger is that the play can easily seem, as Agate said in 1925, like two-and-a-half hours of gorgeous fooling followed by 20 minutes of tragedy: the best productions I've seen, by Trevor Nunn for the RSC and Joe Dowling for the Dublin Gate, have imbued the whole work with a measured sadness. Here, although Hynes seeks to signal the tragic outcome by bringing the publicly treacherous Johnny and his privately betrayed sister Mary in front of the curtain before the start of each act, her production jerkily switches genres. It starts as a laugh-riot and ends as Greek drama, whereas the essence of O'Casey is that the comedy is always penetrated by tragedy.
It is an evening where the parts are much greater than the whole; and nothing is more enjoyable to watch than Gambon's fake-Captain whose only marine experience was on a Dublin-Liverpool collier. Everything about Gambon implies comic contradiction. His jaunty nautical cap is belied by his ragged, shrunken, Chaplinesque trousers. And his sheer physical bulk is in stark contrast to his spiritual deference and fear. Gambon stands ludicrously to attention for the reading of a will, nods knowingly when his daughter's theosophist lover talks of the Yogi allowing his hands to embody them as if they were circumambient dwarfs and yet, on discovering she is pregnant, violently rips the hearts out of his daughter's beloved books. Inside every fat man, said Cyril Connolly, there is a thin man signalling to be let out: the marvel of Gambon's performance is that it gives us both Boyle's Falstaffian weight and spiritual littleness.
John Kavanagh played the part of Boyle's constant companion, Joxer Daly, at the Gate, and has the character to the life. He makes him a scuttling scarecrow of a man who seems to inhabit the tenement stairs, who sees through Boyle as an "oul bummer" but who needs someone to despise and who is always ready to play the earthy Estragon to Boyle's self-inflated Vladimir. I felt more equivocal about Marie Mullen's Juno. Though she rises magnificently to the demands of the last act, early on she seems too much the tenement termagant and too little the woman for whom domestic routine becomes a practical defence against boozy male vanity.
Brid Brennan, however, is excellent as the widowed Maisie Madigan, whom she plays as a rampant flirt wrapping herself round Mary Boyle's schoolteacher lover with omnivorous glee. And Declan Conlon marvellously plays her sexual victim as a chillingly sinister prig: one whose declaration, as the corpse of Mrs Tancred's Republican son is taken downstairs, that "the only way to deal with a mad dog is to destroy him" causes even Boyle and Joxer to blench.
It's a good moment that signals O'Casey's hatred of inhumanity and anti-heroic compassion. But although this production, which has an eye to Broadway, is full of good acting and telling detail, it finally seems as enthralled by the stars as Jack Boyle himself: it'll be fascinating to see, in a week's time, whether John Crowley's more intimate Donmar Warehouse revival captures the molten tragi-comic quality of O'Casey's masterpiece which in Dublin proves faintly elusive.
• At the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin (00353-1-677-1717) till October 2.
