The Abbey Theatre
and Synge’s Playboy of the Western World
 1891 W.B. Yeats founds the Irish Literary Society in
London; in 1892 in Dublin.
 1893 Douglas Hyde founds the Gaelic League to
preserve and revive the Irish language, the study of its
literature and the encouraging of a new literature to be
written in Irish
 Paradoxically the first plays came in English from the
Anglo-Irish writers
 Between 1892 and 1899 Yeats and others discuss
opening a small theatre in Dublin
Lady Gregory
 The widow of a Clare landowner
 provided much of the practical business intelligence of
the theatre
 Great patron and supporter of Yeats
 Made her home at Coole Park both a salon for great
literary figures of the time could meet and a refuge for
Yeats
 1899 first performances of the Irish Literary Theatre
given at the Ancient Concert Rooms in Dublin
 1903 Synge’s In The Shadow of the Glen premiered
 1904 Abbey Theatre opened
 1904 Synge’s Riders To The Sea
 1905 The Well of the Saints
 1907 Playboy of the Western World
 1908 The Tinker’s Wedding
 1909 Synge dies, aged 37
John Millington Synge
 J. M. Synge was born in Rathfarnham, Ireland on April 16,
1871. Synge began his studies in music theory, Irish
history and language as well as began to write poetry at
Trinity College in Dublin, and he completed a bachelor’s
degree in 1892.
 Synge left Ireland in 1893 to study music in Germany. A
year later, Synge began language and literature studies at
the Sorbonne. During his time in Paris, Synge met William
Butler Yeats, who would have a dramatic effect on the rest
of Synge’s life. Yeats encouraged him to go to the Aran
Island and to “live there as if you were one of the people
themselves; express a life that has never found expression.”
For four years, Sygne accessed the Irish life and carefully
noted the speech habit, and what he extracted from the
Aran Island became important element in his later work
including The Playboy of the Western World.
Summary of the play
 Act 1
 This play is set in County Mayo in a country pub.
Pegeen Mike is engaged to Shawn Keogh, but she
doesn’t love him. Pegeen’s father, Michael James, owns
the pub. At one night arrives a young man who calls
himself Christy Mahon and claims that he has killed his
father. All people in the pub are fascinated and admire
Christy’s heroic deed. Later on comes the widow Quin
whose burning curiosity to the newcomer urges her to
come to the pub and try to get Christy to stay with her
in her place. Pegeen refuses to let him go and quarrels
with the widow Quin.
Act 2
 The following morning some local girls and the widow
Quin visit Christy and beg him to tell them his heroic
story. They regard Christy as a hero and ask him to
participate in their local sport games. In the meantime,
Christy’s father, Old Mahon, arrives and meets the widow
Quinn. Mahon explains to the Widow Quin that Christy
hit him but he recovered, and he describes Christy as a
coward.
Act 3
 After Christy having won the game, he proposes to
Pageen. When they returns the pub, old Mahon appears
and exposes Christy’s boast. In order to prove himself a
hero, Christy gives old Mahon another blow on the head,
and it looks as if he is dead. The villagers including
Pegeen decide to capture him and hang him. Finally Old
Mahon recovers and saves Christy. After they leave,
Pegeen laments her loss of the ‘only playboy of the
western world.’
The Playboy of the Western World
 Both a comedy and a tragedy
 A satire on rural Irish values and behaviour
 First production on 26th January 1907
Controversy and Riots
 Lady Gregory: ‘There was a battle of a week. Every night
protestors with their trumpets came and raised a din.
Every night the police carried some of them off to the
police courts… There was a very large audience on the
first night… Synge was there but Mr Yeats was giving a
lecture in Scotland. The first act got its applause, and
the second, though one felt that the audience were a
little puzzled, a little shocked at the wild language. Near
the end of the third act there was some hissing. We had
sent a telegram to Mr Yeats after the end of the first act
“Play great success”; but at the end we sent another –
“Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift”.
What caused offence?
 Apparent glorification of parricide
 Disregard for law & authority
 Suggestions of blasphemy in the juxtapositions of ‘wild
language’:
 Or Marcus Quin, God rest him, got six months for
maiming ewes…
Is it killed your father?
With the help of God I did surely and that the Holy
Immaculate Mother may intercede for his soul.
The line that started the riot:
A drift of chosen females, standing
in their shifts itself, maybe, from
this place to the Eastern world
 The word shift insulting the womanhood of Ireland
whose chastity, purity, even sainthood had become a
national myth
The language of the play
 From Synge’s Preface:
In writing The Playboy of the Western World, as in my other plays, I
have used one or two words only that I have not heard among the
country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could
read the newspapers. A certain number of the phrases I employ I have
heard also from herds and fishermen along the coast from Kerry to
Mayo, or from beggar-women and ballad-singers nearer Dublin; and I
am glad to acknowledge how much I owe to the folk imagination of
these fine people. Anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish
peasantry will know that the wildest sayings and ideas in this play are
tame indeed, compared with the fancies one may hear in any little
hillside cabin in Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay. All art is a
collaboration; and there is little doubt that in the happy ages of
literature, striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the storyteller’s or the playwright’s hand, as the rich cloaks and dresses of his
time. It is probable that when the Elizabethan dramatist took his inkhorn and sat down to his work he used many phrases that he had just
heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children. In Ireland,
those of us who know the people have the same privilege.
 When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen, some years
ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me
from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I
was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the
servant girls in the kitchen. This matter, I think, is of
importance, for in countries where the imagination of the
people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is
possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words, and
at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all
poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form. In the modern
literature of towns, however, richness is found only in
sonnets, or prose poems, or in one or two elaborate books
that are far away from the profound and common interests
of life. One has, on one side, Mallarmé and Huysmans
producing this literature; and on the other, Ibsen and Zola
dealing with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words.
 On the stage one must have reality, and one must have
joy; and that is why the intellectual modern drama has
failed, and people have grown sick of the false joy of the
musical comedy, that has been given them in place of
the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in
reality. In a good play every speech should be as fully
flavoured as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot
be written by anyone who works among people who
have shut their lips on poetry. In Ireland, for a few years
more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery and
magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who wish to
write start with a chance that is not given to writers in
places where the springtime of the local life has been
forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only, and the
straw has been turned into bricks.
Some of the themes:
 The rural community
 Attitudes to law and lawlessness
 Position of women
 The role of the hero / murderer as celebrity
 The transformative effects of language