The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays

This construction of “the west” (and of Irish rural life in general) was part of a nationalist impulse to restore Irish “dignity” (a word, by the way, to which Lady Gregory, with Yeats and Synge one of the first Directors of the Abbey, was greatly attached). So that a reevaluation of traditional Ireland was, in effect, an important part of a modernizing process by means of which Ireland could position herself as a sovereign state free from the centuries-old dominion of Britain. The idealization of Irish rural life therefore, while attractive symbolically, was also a major element in the forging of a mind-set ready to challenge British control. The imagination, in other words, had a political context that gave evocations of “the west” an extra charge all the more exciting for being a little obscured, more inferred than asserted openly.

In the Shadow of the Glen (that was its original title; now it is frequently given the briefer, less satisfying, title The Shadow of the Glen) was first staged with Yeats’s The King’s Threshold at Molesworth Hall on 8 October 1903 by the Irish National Theatre Society. This was well before the Abbey, the name later given to the Irish National Theatre, opened its doors in Abbey Street in the old Mechanics Institute on 27 December 1904.

The Irish National Theatre Society had a Reading Committee, which included Yeats, of course, along with the poet-theosophist George Russell (“AE”), the brothers William and Frank Fay (who were actors in the Society), and Padraic Colum, the poet. In approving the play, Yeats either overruled the committee or acted unilaterally, for Hyde and Maud Gonne left the Society, in part because of their objections. Gonne was Yeats’s beloved, whom he had adored for many years, and who had taken the lead part in Yeats’s and Lady Gregory’s powerful nationalist play, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, in 1902.

On the one hand, there were avid nationalists, in the tradition of the Fenian Brotherhood and ultimately the IRA, who were not going to be easy to conciliate; and on the other hand, there were the likes of Hyde, peaceful and constitutional nationalists but people easy to offend by an unflattering view of the Irish peasant. And unflattering of Irish rural values In the Shadow certainly was: Maud Gonne wrote in a letter, “from all I hear I think [the play] is horrid and I will have no responsibility for it—it was forced on the company by a trick”—the trickster being of course the person to whom this letter was addressed, Yeats himself.³

Although In the Shadowmay not be “horrid,” it is, in many ways, very shocking and perhaps even a bit horrifying if you were a militarily inclined republican or a modernizing nationalist in 1903. The people in this play are a million light-years from the idealized paradisal Gaelic pastoral entertained by Hyde and necessary for revolutionary propaganda. These people are narrow, greedy, deceitful, adulterous, violent, and drunken.

The play is set in County Wicklow in Glenmalure, which Synge knew well, the family summer residence at Tomriland being close by.⁴ However, he heard the story on which the play is based during his first visit to the Aran Islands in 1898. A famous seanchaí or storyteller on Irishmaan called Pat Dirarie told Synge that, one night while traveling the roads, he came to a house where he found before him a young woman who had laid out the corpse of her husband. According to Dirane’s story, what happened to him was not that different from what Synge depicts in the play. Synge’s defense, therefore, against those who accused him of traducing the innate dignity of the indigenous (and Catholic) Irish was that the play only dramatized what he had heard on Irishmaan, a cradle of Gaelic civilization in the far west.

Synge conveys the actualities of Irish country life in vivid, sharp, and energetic speech, which he makes into a poetry of ferocious reality. In a preface he wrote for The Playboy of the Western World, he tells us that his writing of In the Shadow was given energy by a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house he was staying in at the time, through which he could hear the talk of the serving girls in the kitchen below. The house was Tomriland, the story out of Aran.

Far from extolling the virtues of rural life and of Irish country people Synge brings to this depiction of the adulteries latent in a Wicklow glen a grim and focused poetry in a language full of charged realization and sudden vituperations. The glen is very much in shadow—a shadow of repression, loneliness, and despair. This is how Nora, the young wife, describes her husband’s death spasm to the Tramp, who arrives in the night:

... he went into his bed, and he was saying it was destroyed he was, the time the shadow was going up through the glen, and when the sun set on the bog beyond he made a great lep, and let a great cry out of him, and stiffened himself out the like of a dead sheep. (p. 9)

At the end of the play, after her husband, who has been feigning death to catch her out, shows her the door, the Tramp offers her the companionship of the roads, which is to say homelessness, cold, discomfort, but also change, adventure, freedom. The Tramp beautifully evokes the itinerant life:

... you’ll be hearing the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks and the big thrushes when the days are warm . . . it’s fine songs you’ll be hearing when the sun goes up, and there’ll be no old fellow wheezing, the like of a sick sheep, close to your ear. (pp. 24-25)

There was uproar at all of this—drinking, carrying on outside marriage, timorousness, and deceit, rendered all the more striking by Synge’s relentless poetry of the sordid and bleak, counterbalanced only by the black comedy of the language, and the Tramp’s envisioning of the “big thrushes” on the warm days and a life unconfined by staleness and rigor.

Arthur Griffith (1871-1922), founder and first president of Sinn Féin, was outraged by the play, and from this point onward, there was unremitting strife between the Irish National Theatre Society (later the Abbey) and Irish nationalist convictions, tensions that continue, to a greater or lesser extent, to this day more than a hundred years later.

Riders to the Sea was written during 1902 and produced, again at Molesworth Hall, on 25 February 1904. It was based on incidents that occurred during Synge’s stays on Irishmaan in 1900 and 1901. In the Shadow envisions release from dead routine through life on the open road, but Riders to the Sea evokes a pagan and material world where there is no escape from iron fate.

It is a masterpiece of concentration and structure. Maurya is awaiting news of her son Michael, who has not returned from the sea. A body has been washed ashore in Donegal (the play is set on one of the Aran Islands) and a shirt and a stocking taken from the body have been sent south. This is the bundle carried by Nora, one of the daughters, as she enters at the start of the play. Leaning against the wall are the boards ready for Michael’s coffin. Suddenly the door, which she has only half closed, is blown violently open by a surge of Atlantic wind, establishing immediately the frailty and vulnerability of life lived in a tiny cottage beaten by oceanic winds and of the boats smashed by terrible seas in which men are drowned continually. Maurya, in a dire catalogue at the close of the play, tells us that she has lost her husband, her husband’s father, and six sons to the sea: eight men in all. The play brings before us the drowning of her last son, Bartley, who is to be buried in the boards brought for Michael’s coffin.

Fate is inexorable, as is the market. Maurya’s first words, when she enters and sees Cathleen, her other daughter, hiding the bundle containing Michael’s clothes in the turf loft, are: “Isn’t it turf enough you have for this day and evening?” (p. 31). This opening rebuke underlines the harshness and poverty of Aran life, a life very far from the paradisal view of the west. Cathleen tells her mother that she wants the extra turf to make sure the bread is baked for Bartley before he crosses over to Connemara on the mainland to sell the red mare and the gray pony. And this, in a sure structural development, moves into the acrimonious debate as to whether Bartley should go sailing with the wind rising up from the northeast, a bad sign. But just as Maurya has to be watchful about the turf, in this pitilessly harsh economy, Bartley cannot miss the opportunity to get a good price for the horses in Connemara. It is not just the sea, and fate, and chance that rule these lives—it is money also.

Nothing prevails against the bleak laws of this universe, even blessings or the priest, let alone the intimacy of family. What hope can there be of survival in a house where there are no men left to take to the sea to bring in the necessary food? Maurya, so preoccupied is she with the danger Bartley is submitting himself to in taking to the sea in bad weather, fails to bless him as he goes out the door, and the sisters forget to give him the freshly baked bread to take with him. There is a ritualistic implication at work that refers to benediction, communion, and the Eucharist, but only to emphasize the ineffectuality of these devices against real life.⁵ And what is real life is not just bad weather, but the conspiring of ill omen and unrelenting misfortune. In a futile attempt to right her omissions, Maurya goes down to the spring well to bless Bartley and give him the bread. Instead this act of Christian ritual is frozen by what she sees, “the fearfulest thing any person has seen, since the day Bride Dara seen the dead man with the child in his arms” (p. 39), as she describes it to her two daughters.

For what she saw at the spring well was the antithesis of rebirth, blessing, communion. She saw the riders to the sea, Bartley on the red mare (red is the color of the Celtic underworld, of the sidh, the fairies) and behind him, on the gray pony, her dead son Michael with new shoes on his feet.

The 1890s and the early 1900s saw a tremendous surge of interest in folklore and folk belief all over Europe, and Ireland was no exception: Hyde’s Love Songs was but one instance of the research into and the publication of folklore. Synge was himself a student of folk belief, mythology, and legend and their role in Irish and Celtic culture; while he lived in Paris, he attended the lectures on these topics by the Celticist Henrí d‘Arbois de Jubainville at the Sor bonne. It will be clear from the above account, however, that Synge’s dramatic integration of folk culture into his creative realization of the vulnerability of Aran life is no mere primitivist coloring. His use of folk culture and the survival within it of elements of pre-Christian practices and beliefs has two functions: to convey something of the absolute terror this mind experiences when confronted with evidence of a world beyond this one; and to confront his 1904 audience with the futility of Christian blessing against the dark forces of the world, no matter what they are, whether material or inscrutable.

The play was received badly by the critics but on the whole the audience loved it: on 26 February Joseph Holloway, the diarist and chronicler of virtually every Dublin play for decades, tells us that the audience responded to the final curtain with total silence, and that it could not applaud.⁶

By contrast, when The Playboy of the Western World was staged on 26 January 1907 at the Abbey Theatre, there were riots. The riots came about because, once again, Synge used his considerable linguistic and dramatic powers to confront reality and to render it in scenes, transactions, and interchanges that relentlessly focus on the way things really are, not what his audience would like them to be. In the preface to this play, he wrote, “All art is a collaboration” (p. 1): between the language people use in their actual circumstances and the mind of the artist as he (or she) assembles form. The trouble was that The Playboy, instead of idealizing Irish country people, and confirming the Celtic pastoralism of Hyde and the political agenda of the likes of Arthur Griffith and Maud Gonne, attacked the notion that the Irish were in any way superior to those who governed them. Synge opens up a world of drunkenness, violence, and lawlessness in his version of County Mayo. This world bore no resemblance to the concept of Ireland promoted by what now had come to be called Sinn Féin. Sinn Féin ideology, insisting on the right of Ireland to self-governance and independence, enshrined an ideal of Irish manhood as virtuous, disciplined, and chivalrous while Irishwomen were perceived as being modest, restrained, and gentle.

No wonder The Playboy caused a riot. To many on the opening night it seemed as if Synge (suspect anyway because of his Anglo-Irish and Protestant clerical background) had gone out of his way to be offensive to Ireland and the Irish, and especially to the people of the west. His characters are priest-ridden, hypocritical, violent, and drunken, ready at one moment to idealize a killer and at the next to reject him, torture him, and inform upon him when it looks as if their erstwhile hero may draw trouble down on themselves.

Heroism itself, especially heroism associated with violence, is one of Synge’s major themes; the other is sex. One of the things that The Playboy is about is the attraction of physical violence when it is used against an oppressive force: Christy Mahon’s supposed slaying of his father, Old Mahon, (his “old man” in the Irish rural parlance). Synge is, blasphemously, playing here on Christy as the Christ-Man and Old Mahon as St. Paul’s old man who dies in the sacrificial death of Christ the Redeemer. The audience of 1907 might not have gotten the undertones completely, but they would have smelled an atheistic rat beneath the attack on Irish peasantry.

The Mayo people, especially the girls, go crazy for this wild man from the south who has killed his da, and Synge, with total clear-sightedness, acknowledges the attractions of the idea of violence to timorous minds and dysfunctional communities: the violent man embodies what they can never be. The twist Synge gives this, of course, is that their hero worship is all very well as long as it is a story, but as soon as Old Mahon appears and Christy resolves to kill his da on their very doorstep, they turn on him. Synge is preparing his audience, many of whom were active in Sinn Féin and had come along in a restive mood in any case, with a representation of a very real dilemma. It is one thing to tell yourself and others stories of Ireland’s valor and of the glory of conflict, but what will it be like actually to kill other people? As Pegeen says, at the end of the play: “there’s a great gap between a gallows story and a dirty deed. (To MEN) Take him from this, or the lot of us will be likely put on trial for his deed to-day” (p. 121). These are views that would have been expressed in Dublin in 1916. Pegeen, incidentally, was played by Synge’s fiancée, Molly Allgood, and their difficulties caused by their differences in class and religion (Molly was an orphan and Catholic) and the dominating presence of Synge’s evangelical mother, Kathleen, are woven into the play’s complex ventures into sexuality, the nature of maleness, and the problematic aspects of the sexual charge between men and women.

Christy is the playboy, in whom the masculine sexual impulses are “at play”: he plays at being the boy, the “boyo.” But he also plays in other fields. It should be recalled that, at this time in history, Sig mund Freud was developing his theories of sexual complexes and of the psychopathology of sex, and that Carl Jung was beginning work on the archetypal structure of the unconscious, which included analysis of the anima, as the feminine impulse, repressed in the male at a cost.

Act Two opens with a strange scene: Christy is looking at himself in the mirror, alone on stage, and he thinks that he has begun, physically, to change now that he has assumed the role of the hero who killed his da (the Freud connection is obvious). Looking into the mirror he says: “Didn’t I know rightly I was handsome.... I’ll be growing fine skin from this day, the way I’ll have a soft lovely skin on me” (pp. 74-75). Now the girls arrive, Christy sees them through the window (he says, “Stranger girls” [p. 75], and Synge in this phrase acknowledges the strangeness of male/female encounters in highly charged states) and hides. They arrive, bearing gifts for the parricide hero, and are disappointed not to find him there. One of the girls wonders if the en crustations on his boots are blood, but Sara, bolder than the rest, says its just the rusty bog water, and pulls one on. Again Synge is deliberately turning his play into a play on boys and girls, what they are and how they look (mirrors again) and this theme of cross-dressing is another implication in the play of the shifting nature of sexual identity. While the audience would not necessarily be conscious of the theme, they would certainly not be too happy with this type of carrying-on. The transvestism theme returns at the end of the play, when Sara and the Widow Quin try to dress up Christy in one of Sara’s petticoats so he can get away from the crowd, who now want to hang the hero they earlier elevated to superman status. This is what T. S. Eliot called “savage farce” when he attempted to describe the mixture of comedy, horror, grim cruelty, and irrepressive life in Marlowe’s late play The Jew of Malta.⁷The instability of sexual identity is linked to instability in the way communities perceive themselves and others; there is an instability of self-perception (Christy’s not the man he thought he was, or is he?); and there is instability in others (Sara says of Pegeen: “Her like does often change” [p. 117]). And there is a great change coming over the playboy himself. It is, quite evidently, a play in which everything is shifting. Far from there being in it a vision of the west as charming, consoling, full of blarney, a friendly drink, and mild delight, with the odd frisson of violence to liven things up (as in John Ford’s film The Quiet Man), Synge’s west is dark, unpredictable, driven by sexual tensions and frustrations, where drink is a means of ensuring temporary oblivion from the chaos of suspicion, hatred, and petty greed. Is there such a thing as a personality or character at all? One of Synge’s favorite locutions from Hiberno-English (“The likes of,” “her like,” “it’s like I’m saying”) more than hints that what is thought of as identity may be no more than gestures of simulation rather than something ordained and laid down.

All of this goes to explain why an audience, packed with Sinn Féin adherents, found this play offensive. So that when Christy says he wouldn’t give Pegeen for “a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself” (p. 119), there had been so much shifting about and inference and insinuation going on that they were ready to blow. And there was total uproar, because the audience did not know what kind of Ireland this was that Synge was presenting to them. In all kinds of ways, their reaction was entirely understandable. This was an insult to Irish womanhood, Irish civility, Irish hospitality, Irish goodness. There were shouts of “Sinn Féin forever,” “Bring out the author and we’ll deal with him,” “This is not the west.”⁸

On the opening night, Yeats was in Aberdeen, where he received a telegram from Lady Gregory, saying, “Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift.”⁹ Disturbances continued through the week: on Tuesday, 29 January, the police were called in, a act that was guaranteed to inflame Sinn Féin, and on Monday, 4 February, there was a public debate during which Synge had few to defend him. He himself did not appear. He was ill, and it is hardly any wonder, given that his health was unsure anyway, and now he was suffering the added strain of seeing the woman he loved, Molly Allgood, subjected to public odium for playing the part of (what seemed to many) something not too remote from a whore.

The gap between reality and what the human mind, in its efforts to console itself, makes of it—in particular, the reality of relations between men and women—is what drives the inquiry that is The Playboy, and became the subject of Synge’s last, unfinished, play, Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910). But Synge was dead before the Abbey produced it.

Yeats described Synge, very accurately, as “that enquiring man.”¹⁰ He did not “celebrate” rural or ancient Ireland; he explored it, as would a psychologist, sociologist, or anthropologist. The language he developed in his work is quite different from what Hyde and Lady Gregory achieved. While they used Gaelic forms in Hiberno-English syntax to bring life and vitality to their work, his became an instrument of keen incision into the body of his material. His language is poetic, yes, and wild and baroque at times, but he is always alert to how its forms convey the actuality of the situation. Toward the end of The Playboy, Christy turns on his da, this time in front of everyone. Old Mahon puts him down, trying to assert his old authority: “Shut your gullet and come on with me.” But Christy replies, shifting now into a new gear, “I’m going, but I’ll stretch you first” (p. 119). That is the way people talk in fights. It is real, but it is also attentive to the reality of power and change in father-son relations. This is no local color: this is Vienna, Freud, the reality of violence in everyday life.

Synge’s influence on Irish drama has been immense, in one way. His language seemed more picturesque than it was, and it has had many lesser, though not uninteresting, imitators: T. C. Murray, R. J. Ray, Rutherford Mayne, and down to Martin McDonogh in the late 1990s. But very few dramatists or artists face the challenges that Synge faced, brilliantly described by Yeats in the same stanza of the poem already quoted, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”: he “chose the living world for text.” Synge’s drama is crammed with the life of his time, which makes it, like Ben Jonson‘s, timeless.

ENDNOTES