We've had a lot of tenement living in the Lyttelton auditorium at the National over this past year. Last autumn saw Josie Rourke's fine production of Men Should Weep, a grimly compelling look at eked-out existences in the Glasgow tenements of the Thirties, and now we're back a decade and across the Irish sea to 1922 Dublin. The similarities between the two plays are startling, with their hardworking matriarchs, fathers struggling for work and rebellious daughters going off with "fancy men". Here, though, in the second part of Sean O'Casey's pulsing, modern classic Dublin Trilogy, the backdrop to all this poverty and debt is the Irish Civil War.
All the sons of this particular clattering tenement block are either dead or injured, including the disturbed Johnny (Ronan Raftery), scion of the Boyle family who previously lost an arm fighting for the IRA. I longed to hear more of his back-story and that of his feisty sister Mary (Clare Dunne), on strike and reading Ibsen, but instead there's an awful lot of roistering from feckless father Jack (Ciarán Hinds) and his wastrel friend Joxer (Risteárd Cooper) to sit through. Jack's wife Juno (Sinéad Cusack) looks as worn out by the whole situation as we soon start to feel.
The trouble with Howard Davies's elegant - but should tenement living really resemble the paintings of Hammershøi? - production is that it lacks vital degrees of gradation. Cusack, who admittedly rallies for a terrific final scene, still looks miserable when things temporarily go well for the Boyles; Hinds still looks jolly when all is woe.
Throughout these twists of fortune, the events being recounted never come to matter to us all that much. When a young man's life, as well as the economic survival of his family, hangs in the balance, that's not an optimum state of affairs.
Still, it's encouraging to see the National embark on its first co-production with the Abbey, Ireland's national theatre.
Let's hope that this presages further fruitful hook-ups; the National Theatre Wales is in particularly fine form at the moment.
In rep until Feb 26 (020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk)
Juno And The Paycock
National Theatre: Lyttelton
South Bank, SE1 9PX
