First performed in 1924, Seán O’Casey’s classic drama Juno and the Paycock is in the West End from September 2024. Headlined by the Succession star J Smith-Cameron as Juno, it also stars the Oscar, BAFTA and Olivier Award-winning Mark Rylance as Captain Jack Boyle.

Why you should book Juno and the Paycock tickets
Juno and the Paycock offers a powerful and moving portrayal of a mother’s strength and determination.
This is the best-known and most frequently performed piece from Seán O’Casey.
The play will be staged in the West End for the first time since the early 1990s.
A classic Irish play celebrating its 100th birthday
This play goes back a long way. Frequently performed in Ireland, it was first staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin during 1924. Between 1938 to 1980 it was adapted for TV six times. There have been at least 11 radio adaptations, a 1930 movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and a 1959 musical starring Shirley Booth and Melvyn Douglas.

The story is set in the working-class tenements of Dublin in the early 1920s, when the Irish Civil War was at its height. Paycock is simply the Irish word for peacock, which is what Juno calls her drunken dreamer of a husband. It’s the second in the playwright’s Dublin Trilogy, preceded by The Shadow of a Gunman in 1923 and followed by The Plough and the Stars three years later in 1926.

A beloved tragicomedy, the action follows the Boyle family, a chaotic bunch trying to scrape by. The drunken rogue Jack Boyle and his witty wife Juno live in a tiny flat but ‘Captain’ Jack Boyle fancies himself as the commander of a ship. Sadly he only ever sails as far as the pub and back. When fate comes knocking with life-changing news, will the Boyles’ luck change?

The cast and creative team of Juno and the Paycock
Mark Rylance has been nominated many times and has won many awards including Tonys and BAFTAs. At the 88th Academy Awards he won Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Rudolf Abel in Bridge of Spies. He’s one of eight actors to win the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play twice and one of six to enjoy nominations for two acting categories in the same year.

J Smith-Cameron spent most of her career on stage, making her Broadway debut in 1982’s Crimes of the Heart. She won a Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play for Our Country’s Good in 1989 and was also nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play for Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock in 2014. This is her UK debut.

Matthew Warchus also has a stellar West End career behind him, the Artistic Director of London’s The Old Vic since September 2015. This is his seventh collaboration with Rylance.

The creative side of the production is crafted by Rob Howell (Set and Costume Designer), Hugh Vanstone (Lighting Designer), Claire van Kampen (Composer) and Serena Hill CDG (Casting Director), and the show is Produced by Sonia Friedman Productions.

Heading to the West End in late 2024, Juno and the Paycock is a big-hearted, darkly humorous tragi-comic triumph that highlights a mother’s resilience amidst life’s most challenging times.