What happens when you change the setting of Juno and the Paycock from Dublin to Cork

New meanings have emerged from Sean O’Casey’s classic play by not setting it in Dublin, writes Colette Sheridan

DIRECTOR Ger Fitzgibbon has transposed Sean O’Casey’s famous play, Juno and the Paycock, to the slums of Cork for an Everyman Theatre production.

While traditional productions of O’Casey’s plays are always quintessentially of Dublin, Fitzgibbon doesn’t see Juno and the Paycock as being confined to a Dublin setting. While The Plough and the Stars, set in the lead up to and during the 1916 Rising, has to be set in the capital city “because we all know where the big historical event happened,” he says the story of the Boyle family could have unfolded in any town or city in Ireland during the Civil War.