SOURCE: A review of Juno & the Paycock, in The Spectator, Vol. 135, No. 5082, November 21, 1925, pp. 923-24.

In the following review of the London debut of Juno & the Paycock, the critic focuses on the dramatic atmosphere, local color, and Irish idiom of the play.

What would an Irish play be if it were stripped of its atmosphere and “local colour” and native idiom?

An unfair, an impossible question; a test we need not impose upon a work of art in which form and matter (see Flaubert and Pater) emerge inseparable. We must not complain of Mr. Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, which deserves and has won such high praise in Dublin, and now in London at the Royalty Theatre, that its donée, its theme, its formula, are of the most familiar known to the modern stage. It is enough that the new dramatist's version of the thriftless work-shy...