Ciaran Hinds - Juno and the Paycock

Risteárd Cooper (Joxer Daly) & Ciarán Hinds (Jack Boyle)


Venue: Lyttelton (National Theatre)
Where: West End
Date Reviewed: 17 November 2011
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This fine production of a truly great play marks the first collaboration between our two great institutional national theatres, British and Irish, the National and the Abbey in Dublin, and at this moment in history seems like an emotional truce in the wake of a century of political dispute and terrorism.

Juno’s lament, delivered without any blather or fuss by Sinead Cusack – “Sacred Heart of Jesus, take away our hearts o’ stone, and give us hearts o’ flesh! Take away this murdherin’ hate…” is a cry of enough is enough. Too many people have died in the name of religion and nationalism. So what else is new?

Howard Davies’ production, at once vivid and shadowy, is set in Bob Crowley’s monumental grey tenement apartment, lividly lit by James Farncombe, in the middle of Dublin. Davies does not skimp on the Shakespearean colour and character of the 1924 play, but nor does he let go of its vital, grim documentary flavour, either.

In the full flood of the 1922 civil war, there are marches and gunfire on the street outside. Juno’s son Johnny (Ronan Raftery) is a bitter, wounded cripple of the troubles, still hounded by the IRA enforcers. And Mrs Tancred (Bernadette McKenna) downstairs is about to go to the funeral of her son with other neighbours.

That key dramatic moment was comically, and briefly, undermined by a stuck door on the opening night. But the mood was quickly resumed after a few minutes. That mood, one of lethargic despair, flecked with high spirits, is established by the lounging, scrounging antics of work-shy Captain Jack Boyle and his scarecrow sidekick Joxer Daly.

Ciaran Hinds’ wonderfully aghast and lock-jawed Captain Jack would go for a job interview in his moleskin trousers if he could get over the twinges in his legs.

As Juno says, he can’t climb a ladder but he can skip like a goat into a snug. An unexpected windfall in a distant relative’s will sees the apartment flooded with posh new furniture; but that proves a temporary illusion along with all the others.

The personal and political are seamlessly interwoven as Juno’s daughter, Mary (a lovely, engaging performance by Clare Dunne), brushes off Tom Vaughan-Lawlor’s devoted union activist in favour of Nick Lee’s socially bumptious schoolteacher. And of course that goes off the rails, too, with disruptive consequences.

It is a treat for London audiences to make acquaintance with modern Abbey Theatre stars such as Risteárd Cooper as the fawning, elasticated Joxer (turfed unceremoniously out the window when Juno returns to interrupt his “illicit” sausage breakfast with the Captain) and Janet Moran as the vaudevillian Maisie Madigan.

One of my earliest memories at the National is of the late, great Colin Blakely, sprawled on the stage of the Old Vic, drunkenly declaring that the whole world’s in a terrible state o’ chassis.

Hinds makes the moment more archly tragic, perhaps, but he carries the flawed humanity of the character slyly through the play, magnificently offset against Cusack’s trim, grey, worn-down figure of a plaster saint with no halo; and, anyway, at the end, it’s much more goodbye than halo.

- by Michael Coveney

Whats on stage

Hollywood star Ciarán Hinds harks back to his Irish roots in Juno And The Paycock, a play about the 1920s civil war.

Ciarán Hinds returns to the bad old days in Juno And The Paycock

When Ciarán Hinds was growing up in Belfast, his main entertainment was the annual Orange Order march. For a middle-class Catholic kid, that sounds pretty surprising, but then, as Hinds says: ‘We went because it was the only bloody thing happening. Rio had its carnival; Spain had its festivals; we had the triumphalist July 12 parades. But at least there were bands. Ireland in those days was practically medieval. On a Sunday, not only were the parks locked but the swings were chained up too.’

Hinds may have left Ireland in the 1970s, never again to kick a desultory ball outside the park gates when perhaps he should have been at mass, but he is currently tapping back into his country’s febrile political history in Howard Davies’s new production of Sean O’Casey’s Juno And The Paycock, a co-production between Dublin’s Abbey Theatre and the National in London.
This incendiary dispatch from Ireland’s 1920s civil war remains a 20th-century landmark, following the Boyle family trying to keep their heads above water amid the politics and poverty raging through the Dublin slums – despite the best efforts of Hinds’s boozy patriarch Jack, a ‘cheating, skiving, lying, indolent chancer,’ according to the actor.

As a boy from Belfast, Hinds is the first to admit the responsibility of taking on such an iconic play has been ‘a bit scary’. Not least because the production premiered in Dublin before this London opening. ‘I did think: “Holy schmoly,”’ he says with a grin. ‘The first time I worked in Dublin, I was pretty fresh out of drama school [he went to Rada after attending two law lectures at Queen’s]. And everyone I met said: “Oh, so you had to go to drama school, did you? We’re all natural here. You’re a prefabricated what, exactly?’’’

These days, the 58-year-old is a bona fide film star, shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic; he lives in Paris and London with his French-Vietnamese actress girlfriend and their daughter, Aoife. A textbook character actor rather than leading man material – his tough good looks are eminently versatile – he’s notched up credits in Road To Perdition, Steven Spielberg’s Munich and the BBC/HBO series Rome (as Caesar), and been hidden by a mound of prosthetics as Albus Dumbledore’s brother, Aberforth, in the last Harry Potter film.
He’s done indie flicks (The Eclipse), TV crime capers (ITV’s Above Suspicion, which returns next January) and is soon to star in The Woman In Black, opposite Daniel Radcliffe. ‘You can tell there’s been no plan,’ he says. ‘I was always a bit of a floater. Still am.’

Most recently, he had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role as ‘soldier’ Roy Bland in Tomas Alfredson’s plaudit-laden Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a film he signed up for not just because he knew all the cast and ‘wanted to sit round a table with them again’ but because he had been so struck by Alfredson’s beautiful vampire flick Let The Right One In.

‘Alfredson really knows what to do with a camera,’ he says. ‘I loved the fact TTSP is basically a Swedish director spying on a set of British spies.’

But it’s theatre that, for him, remains a bit special. In 1987, after several years at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre, he joined Peter Brook in Paris and embarked on an 18-month tour with The Mahabharata, travelling the world with an international cast.
‘It was unbelievably exotic for a geezer like me,’ he says. ‘I thought: ‘‘How will everyone get on?’’ But it was also a great adventure. An opening to the world. It taught me to take risks. To listen. With Peter, it’s not about acting but about unlearning acting. That’s really hard.’

Hinds has lived a long way from home for many decades and, from a distance, he used to publicly criticise the Irish peace process, back in the day when progress appeared grindingly slow. ‘But my sister, who has been working in the system for a long time told me: ‘‘You have to be careful in interviews how you talk about home,’’’ he says. ‘

Because there are still people who haven’t left, trying, rather heroically and without pontificating, to get things moving forwards. I do believe in the French way, that your religion is your family’s business and it should be kept that way. From the age of four, where I grew up, there were two different schools, Catholic and Protestant, and once you have that division, so early, it’s like a rupture through society.’

How does he think Juno And The Paycock resonates today, given the recent dissident rumblings? ‘There will always be a legacy to the treaty signed between Ireland and Britain in 1921,’ he says carefully. ‘If you create borders, things don’t go away. And young people will always want to die for causes. But then it’s also up to people to take responsibility for themselves and make the best of it.’
He pauses. ‘You know, O’Casey became an international socialist. It wasn’t just politics: he was interested in improving the standard of living. And not just for the Irish but for all human beings.’

Juno And The Paycock opens Nov 16. www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Metro

Read more: http://www.metro.co.uk/film/881007-ciaran-hinds-returns-to-the-bad-old-days-in-juno-and-the-paycock#ixzz1d8B2To3Y

Juno And The Paycock promotion clip - Ciaran Hinds

Juno And The Paycock opening night

Third trailer for The Woman In Black »

The Seafarer's Blog  www.ciaranhinds.eu

20th October 2011, 07:15 pm

Featuring interviews with actress Sinéad Cusack and costume and set designer Bob Crowley.

“The Captain is a chancer, a skiver, a liar, a cheat, and a bully. He’s aggressive and drunk. What’s appealing about that? Yet you have to make him human somewhere, whether it’s through his sense of wonder or of loss,” says Ciarán.

After its run on the Abbey stage, it will transfer to the National Theatre.

CIARAN HINDS!

Ciarán Hinds is standing at the stage door of the National Theatre in London, where he has spent the day rehearsing for Juno and the Paycock, Sean O'Casey's play about 1920s Ireland. He is wearing jeans, a loose T-shirt and a tweed flat cap. "That's a fitting hat for the play you're doing," I offer, by way of a greeting. "And what's yours?" he shoots back, nodding towards my black bowler with a good-natured smile and a raised eyebrow. "Waiting for Godot, maybe?"
While waiting to be shown up to the theatre's interview room, Hinds explains how Juno will travel to the Abbey theatre before returning to London to play in rep with The Veil, Conor McPherson's new plays. The Juno run-throughs have taken over the National Theatre's main rehearsal space so McPherson and his crew have had to practise offsite. "They might be pissed of," Hinds says with a shrug of the shoulders. "But that's life."

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Hinds is grounded, easy-going and good fun; fitting attributes for an actor who plays character roles rather than male leads in films such as Munich, The Road to Perdition and the forthcoming Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, adapted from the espionage novel by John le Carré. Moreover, his relaxed attitude befits an actor who grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and is about to star in a politically contentious play about the Irish civil war - which also happens to be the first co-production between the British and Irish National theatres. Decades of distance from "the national question" have given him the first British-Irish co-production such a big deal is that it really isn't one at all.
"I left Belfast in 1973," says Hinds, 58. "I was at Queen's University for half a year messing about and then I went to London. Just the idea stepping off the island opened me immediately in a bigger way than I was thinking about, because we were constricted there, choked. You could have got involved (in the Troubles). It was all happening. It was dangerous, exciting, dynamic. You were of an age.
"Then, whatever it is takes you away, and whether you're brought up nationalist or loyalist, British or Irish, suddenly you come away and meet young people your own age who are fascinated, have no idea and genuinely want to know (about Northern Ireland). Then you realise this is nothing to do with their parents or anything before that. That opened me out. It was important for me at that age."
Hinds studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and then spent 13 years working with the Citizen's Theatre in Glasgow. He had been raised Catholic, was taught Irish dancing, and attended St Malachy's, a Catholic grammar school, in Belfast. Yet when he left Northern Ireland he began to question how important these factors were to who he was, and how much his nationality mattered. Then he went to Galway and learnt how to set dance. The rhythm seemed to connect with his soul.
"That's when I really knew I was Irish, in Galway in the mid 1980s," he says. "It's not that I doubted it, but that cemented it."
Hinds also considers himself European. He lives between London and Paris, and has a French-Vietnamese partner, Hélène Patarot, who he met in the 1980s when they were both appearing in The Mahabharata, Peter Brook's stage adaptation of the Sanskrit epic. "I was working in a company of 27 (actors) with 15 different nationalities. Suddenly, you go, 'Hold on, what are rules? What are morals? Oh, so that's what you don't do in your culture. That's nothing to us.' You're in another world. That was lucky, too - moving from Belfast to London, then returning to Ireland and finding who you are, and then being brought somewhere else and it's still bigger than London," he says with an accent that is as much of a melange as the cast of The Mahabharata. "You're travelling around with people who are different colours, speak different languages and you all somehow have to work together and do this 10-hour-piece."
Hinds has been a fixture on the big screen since getting his break in John Boorman's Excalibur, the 1981 film which also helped launch the careers of Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson and the director Neil Jordan, as well as being nominated for an Oscar for best cinematography. Screen work is his bread and butter. When he decided to do Juno, a less lucrative role than starring in a Hollywood movie, his agent wasn't best pleased. However, Hinds says it is important to keep dipping his toes in the theatrical water.

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He has heard that Byrne and Neeson were the original choices to play Captain Jack Boyle, his character in Juno, but doesn't mind being the backup. "Why would I?" he says. "You can't say, 'Bah, humbug.' The world works like that. You've got to unlearn it if you're working on a sense of entitlement or that 'Do you know who I am ' bollocks. Whatever that means." Nor does he mind being one of the five suspected Soviet moles instead of the one spy-catcher in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The projects he does depend on the script, those involved and usually a touch of serendipity.
"For Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I was asked to go for a meeting with the director, a man called Tomas Alfredson," he recalls. "A lot of people might not have known Tomas Alfredson, but I did, because I'd been working with Conor McPherson on a film, The Eclipse, and he asked me had I seen this vampire film, and I said, 'I don't do vampire films, I find them overwrought and it's for this young, trendy, flashy generation. It doesn't do anything for me.'
"He said, 'Ah! But this is a beautiful film'. So he put me onto Let the Right One In (a Swedish movie directed by Alfredson) and it is a beautiful film. Then the next time I come across him, I'm going to meet him to do Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I'd seen this man's work and he asked me to play a small role in it. It's as simple as that."
Hinds, who has yet to see the final cut, believes Alfredson's Swedish origins will leave their mark on a film that is set against the backdrop of the Soviet-British standoff during the cold war. "We're not always aware technically of what goes on behind the camera, but you're aware that Tomas always seemed to be shooting with long lenses. If there was a scene with two people talking, he's have his camera on another roof," says Hinds.
"It was almost as if his camera was spying on spies, just observing. As with that time (the Cold War), it was who was watching who and who was unseen. It was all muted; the style, the production design. He was obviously trying to put something of his own feeling into it - being a Swede, an outsider - talking about what the Brits did, and the Russians."
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy boasts an impressive cast of actors - John Hurt, Toby Jones, Colin Firth - many of whom Hinds had worked with before. He was particularly interested in with working with Gary Oldman, who plays the lead role of George Smiley, the veteran British intelligence expert who is called in to sniff out the Soviet mole. The pair started out together on the Glasgow stage.
It was also in Scotland that Hinds first learnt the line for Juno. At the age of 30, Hinds was playing the same character as he is now. "They had a young company, so they didn't always cast to age, and sometimes you had to step up and play older than you were," he recalls. "The person playing my son was Lorcan Cranitch, an actor from Dublin, who is about seven years younger than me, so I couldn't really have been his father. But that was the way of it."
"It was an old Victorian theatre in the Gorbals of Glasgow, which has always had a big, heavily accented Irish community - a lot of them from Donegal who came over to get work. They do the great classical plays of Europe, like Goethe - they did Faust one time. They were very fond of (Bertolt) Brecht because it was real and rough, and then suddenly they started doing O'Casey. The people, as I remember 30 years ago, it was like food and drink for them."
He suspects this reaction is far away from that of an Abbey audience, where Juno began and the play is sacrosanct. "We'll see about that," he adds. He says "Juno still raises topical issues such as feminism, nationalism and what it is to die for your country. This revival is not about fuelling political differences. As with the 1983 production in Glasgow, it seeks to feed and water the audience's soul."


Source: The Sunday Times

Author: Eithne Shortall

Date: September 4th, 2011

The original posting I had placed here of this article included pictures and three or four quotes added by http://www.ciaranhinds.eu./. As you can see by the comments they took great umbrage.  Even though I had included the original article's source, the author and the date, they wanted credit for the three pictures and the four quotes they had added, unknown to me.  So here it is.  I took out your quotes and put in another picture.  Sorry to have offended.  He is a wonderful wonderful actor, an admiration for whom we both share.