Sean O’Casey’s playful scrounger from the classic, Juno and The Paycock, takes centre stage in this intriguing new play from the pen of Eddie Naughton (Inishfallen Fare Thee Well).
With events that were to alter the course of Irish history as a backdrop, Joxer Daly Esq. charts an everyman journey from respectable member of The Foresters Association to a vagabond scraping by with only his wit to use as collateral.
From the 1913 Lock Out, to the Rising – and the events of O’Casey’s classic The Plough and the Stars – to the birth of a new divided Nationalism, in Juno and The Peacock, we see it all through the eyes of a survivor like no other. Joxer Daly is an ordinary person trying to navigate the difficult waters of what was Dublin in the period leading up to the birth of a Republic.
Brilliantly performed by Phelim Drew, Joxer’s love of language, humour, literature and song, together with a drinker’s purple recollection, makes this a performance like no other. Entertaining and funny, Joxer Daly Esq. is a thought-provoking gander at one of Irish Literature’s most loveable chancers!
“One of the more riveting takes of recent O’Casey revivals has been the reappraisal of his sage or savvy drinkers for a darker complexity. Without the distraction of accompaniment, director Karl Shiels’s production might look for a similar re-evaluation: is this darlin’, dishevelled man a figure of comedy, or of tragedy?”
Peter Crawley The Irish Times
Tickets €18/€16
