Sarah Snook has just finished her London theatre run in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Brian Cox is currently appearing on stage in Long Day’s Journey Into Night and now the pair’s Succession co-star J Smith-Cameron is also taking on a West End role.
The actor, who plays Gerri Kellman in the blockbuster TV series, will perform alongside Mark Rylance in Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, set in 1922 during Ireland’s civil war and first staged in 1924. The 100th anniversary production will be directed by Matthew Warchus for Sonia Friedman Productions and will run at the Gielgud theatre from 21 September to 23 November. There will be more than 1,100 tickets per week priced at £25 or under for the show.
Smith-Cameron will star as Juno, who strives to keep her family afloat, while Rylance will play her husband Jack, the “paycock” of the title, who loses himself in reverie and alcohol. Smith-Cameron previously played Juno in a 2013 off-Broadway production by the Irish Repertory Theatre. The New York Times’s Charles Isherwood wrote that it was “one of the finest performances of her distinguished career on the New York stage”.
Juno and the Paycock, said Smith-Cameron, “is not simply a brilliant piece of theatre but an eternally relevant play so long as people must endure violent repression”. Her Broadway productions have included Tartuffe, Night Must Fall and The Real Inspector Hound. She received a Tony award nomination for Our Country’s Good in 1991.
Warchus described Juno and the Paycock as a “staggeringly great melodrama – a play which collides an Irish working-class domestic tragedy with some of the comedic bravura of the 1920s music hall in an unforgettable indictment of the chaos of civil war.” Friedman, Warchus and Rylance previously collaborated on Boeing-Boeing in the West End in 2007 and La Bête in 2010.
