The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PREFACE

  IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLEN - A PLAY IN ONE ACT

  RIDERS TO THE SEA - A PLAY IN ONE ACT

  THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD - A PLAY IN THREE ACTS

  AFTERWORD SYNGE: THAT ENQUIRING MAN

  John Millington Synge (1871-1909), one of Ireland’s greatest playwrights, graduated from Trinity College and then studied piano and violin on the Continent before turning to literature. His destiny was changed by a meeting with the poet W. B. Yeats, who suggested he go to Galway and the Aran Islands to live among the peasants. The experience inspired The Aran Islands (1907), Poemsand Translations (1910), and Synge’s plays: In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), Riders to the Sea (1904), The Well of the Saints (1905), The Tinker’s Wedding (1907), The Playboy of the Western World (1907), and the unfinished Deirdre of the Sorrows (1901).

  Edna O‘Brien was educated in a convent and then trained as a pharmacist before publishing her first novel, The Country Girls (1960). She has gone on to publish numerous short story collections and novels, including Down by the River (1997) and In the Forest (2002) and nonfiction works such as Mother Ireland (1977). She lives in London.

  Professor Robert Welch is Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ulster. He is the author of numerous works, including fiction in both English and in Irish; three collections of poetry, including The Blue Formica Table and Muskerry; and such works of criticism as The Abbey Theatre 1899-1999: Form and Pressure, Irish Poetry from Moore to Yeats, and The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature.

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  First Signet Classics Printing, May 1997

  First Signet Classics Printing (Welch Afterword), March 2006

  Introduction copyright © Edna O‘Brien, 1997

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15400-7

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  INTRODUCTION

  by Edna O‘Brien

  When James Joyce railed that he did not want to be a literary Jesus Christ, he need not have worried as that laurel was destined for J. M. Synge, whose most famous play, The Playboy of the Western World, met with a merciless fate. “A violent laughing work” is how Yeats described it. It was dogged with difficulties and booed by Irish zealots who believed it to be a travesty of Irish life and condemned by the Nationalist hero Arthur Griffith as “being a foul echo from degenerate Greece.” Save for Shakespeare and Web ster, I do not know of a playwright whose appetite for language is both so animate and so gory.

  Christy Mahon, the hero of the play, had been a mild sort of a boy in dread of his powerful father, a dominant figure “naked as an ash tree skying clods against the visage of the stars, to put the fear of death into the young pigs and the screeching sows,” until the day came, digging spuds, when Christy could take no more. Oh, what a liberation it would have been to Kafka had he read this, but then Synge had never to battle with his own father (he died while Synge was a child) and so his mother became the unwitting symbol for slaughter. Forget crime, forget punishment, the gusto and suspense of The Playboy is sheer intoxication.

  Having dispatched his father, Christy sets off and for eleven days facing hog, dog and devil, he wonders where he can put his head. He comes to a lonely public house run by an old man and his daughter, Pegeen Mike, whose biting tongue “is the fright of seven town lands.” Christy makes no secret of his crime, even allowing the old man to concede that bravery is a treasure in a lonesome place. As in Greek drama Christy has many obstacles to overcome before winning the love of Pegeen, this Penelope of the bogs who is engaged to a streel of a boy called Sho neen Keogh. There is as well the widow Quin, she who suckled a black ram at her breast, and a welter-of young women, sirens who come to listen to his boastings, revelling in it. They bring him gifts—duck eggs, a cut of cake, and a little pullet crushed by the curate’s car. He is murderer, suitor and hero. It is of course Pegeen that he loves, tempting her with visions of closeness out on the side of the Neifin mountain, in the dews of night and a little shiny moon—the piquancy of the language more amorous than the fiercest embrace. Christy is in his element, except that his father is not dead. Contrary to Greek tragedy, the skull that was supposed to be split in half is merely wounded and bandaged as a furious father takes to the road to avenge the wrong. He arrives on sports day, when Christy has further advanced his prowess by winning all the races, but once the truth is known, the people turn on him, put hot turf coals on his shins and even Pegeen, in defiance of her own heart, rejects him. Yet Christy leaves the public house with his father, not as slave but as a gallant captain who intends to be master from that moment on, a man whose father will be stewing his oatmeal and washing his spuds.

  Yeats talks of “the vivifying spirit of the finest art,” but the spirit of The Playboy was too much for Roman Catholic Irish men, who upon hearing the line “A dream of women in their shifts” rose up in mutiny at this insult to their womankind. Synge was appalled. Violence on the page is one thing, but an ignorant mob quite another. He who wanted to magnify the minds of his audience, to make them realize the dark reaches of the unconscious, the small and the large cries of the soul, was reviled by his own.

  The fate of the play reads like a play itself. Yeats describes being in Scotland, giving a lecture, when he received a telegram from the Abbey Theatre, after the end of Act I saying, “Playboy going very well.” At one in the morning, his host brought in a second telegram to apprise him of riots. The next night, forty bellicose men sat in the middle of the pit making the play inaudible. Some brought tin trumpets and the rucktions began at the rise of the curtain. In it were the mixed ingredients of venom and farce. The cries and the booing of the men in the pit had nothing ancestral about them, they were scurrilous and uncouth, accompanied by hissing, stamping of feet and cries of “Hit him” or “Brain him” the moment the actor playing Christy came on stage. At other moments, the performance was drowned out with the singing of “By the banks of Zuyder Zee,” this meeting with applause and boos while Yeats ran up and down some steps at the side of the stage to beg for order so that the actors could be heard. The audience included fifty or more policemen. Towards the end of the drama, when the father comes to claim his vagabond son, he is told not by Pegeen or by anyo
ne on stage but by the vociferous mob that the villain “is behind the door, old chap.” Everyone leapt to the attack. Articles appeared in the press calling for its withdrawal, and the rioting commenced in the theatre spread into the surrounding streets. A cleaner confessed that she would not use the offending word “shift” not even to her own self and then went on to call Synge “a right snot.” The Freeman’s Journal accused Synge of barbarous jargon and repulsive characterization. It was too much. He took to his bed with influenza, vowing to his sweetheart, the actress Molly Allgood, that he would write quiet and stately things from that moment on. Managements in England and America were reluctant to put it on in case of offending their Irish population, and in New York, where it was performed, a man’s watch and a cake of bread were thrown on stage opening night, in the presence of President Roosevelt. However, unlike Ireland the applause drowned out the hissing. There were seven performances and on the last night 500 policemen were called in to keep order.

  So who was this man? “This silent drifting man,” Yeats described him. Born in 1871 into a genteel and zealously Protestant family in Rathfarnham, near Dublin, he spent his adolescence vacillating, wishing to be at once Shakespeare, Beethoven and Darwin. Finally yielding to the call of music, he left Ireland to travel, first to Germany, and then settled in Paris, where he lived on a pittance and wrote some dilatory verses. It was there Yeats met him and advised him to go to the Aran Islands and listen to the talking of those unsung people. Not long after, Synge set out equipped with his meager belongings—pipe, fiddle, typewriter—and on arrival he purchased a camera from another visitor and resolved to study Irish. He lodged first in Aranmor, the larger island, then moved to Inismean, the middle island. He immersed himself in the place and was enthralled both by the wildness and the resilience of these islanders, flung out on the brink of the Atlantic, having to subsist on fish and the small crops of potatoes which grew on the makeshift patches of clay and seaweed spread over the slabs of limestone. He looked and he listened. He walked, with a near-blind man as his guide, accruing what would turn out in his own estimation to be his “first serious piece of work,” a journal of the islands. He had left, as he put it, “the nullity of the rich and the squalor of the poor” to settle among these hardworking vital peasants who lived long, unrelieved days of Aran mist and rain, whose cattle and horses had to be shipped in hookers over to Galway to graze and whose only source of income was from weaving or from the seaweed which they burnt in kilns and sold as kelp. Men galloped horses at a reckless pace with only a halter to keep the animals in check, and the girls were to be seen with their red petticoats tucked up and standing in pools left by the tide, washing their flannels among the sea anemones. The older men, the story-tellers, clung to the memories of the supernatural, describing encounters with fairies, little “fellas” a yard high with caps pulled down over their faces, playing ball at dusk. But their everyday lives were devoid of any such magic. The sea was at once monster and provider, and the little curachs, which the fishermen rode, mere bits of canvas, a tongue between themselves and eternity. The keening of the women for the drowned fishermen struck him as being orgiastic, their cries and the beating of the coffin-boards suggesting some incomprehensible Arabian rite. There were the deaths from drowning, typhus, rheumatism, old age; there was monstrous hardship but there was also gaiety, stories, dancing in the parlor, courtships, with Synge endearing himself by playing the fiddle and doing conjuring tricks.

  The freeing of the imagination is one of the great bounties of literature. Before going to Aran he had been something of a dilettante, and afterwards came the notebooks and a series of plays bursting with the viscera of that hurt land and that hurt race. Unlike James Joyce or Samuel Beckett, Synge deemed it a sin to have spent any night out of Ireland and even admitted to a jealousy upon hearing of an acquaintance going back to the Blasket Islands, when Synge himself could not go because some duties at the Abbey Theatre kept him captive. Everything Irish became sacred and he had fallen in love, rather as if he had fallen in love with a goddess. But this was no courtly dalliance; this was a hard exacting place, and even in the eyes of the young girls he sensed a prehistoric disillusion. It was also a new world and the necessary rupture which he required from his own class. Before that, he had lived with his mother and family in faded grandeur and even mourned the passing of the eighteenth-century aristocracy manifest in the broken greenhouses and the moth-eaten libraries. His family were landowners, his brother had to evict people from their holdings in County Wicklow and later burned the cabins, but Synge does not write about this—perhaps he couldn’t. He does, however, describe an eviction on the island, his throb of pain at seeing the armed police and a hired rabble arrive in a steamer to evict the people and take away their few animals as surety. What began as tragedy ended in pandemonium, with the women howling and the men driving their pigs and cattle among the police to create chaos and eventually letting loose a bull so that the proceedings were thwarted. English jurisdiction he resented, but he was not a fervent nationalist, not like Maud Gonne, or Yeats under the aegis of Maud Gonne, whose incendiary passions alarmed him. His untethered imagination put him beyond any consideration of national pride or political fervor.

  Yeats and Lady Gregory, fearing that the myths and folktales of Ireland would get lost, visited the peasants and copied down what they heard, but Synge went deeper, he lived with them. A change in a writer’s daemon is a baffling thing and usually brought about by some crisis or inner convulsion. It may be that Synge recognized that the tumor that had to be removed from his neck was the outset of the cancer that would kill him. It may be. Soon after, he lost his hair and from then on, in company, wore a copious black wig. Whom the gods love die young. And it is a great thing when in that abbreviation of time, something seismic is created. Synge knew, and so his characters were to know, man’s ridiculous stance against the furies of time and nature. He knew in his soul (as Camus only knew in his mind) the absurdity of existence and knew that man’s only recourse is defiance. In In the Shadow of the Glen, for instance, a tramp says to a disenchanted woman who is about to leave her snarling husband, “Come along with me now, lady of the house and it’s not blather you’ll be hearing only, you’ll be hearing the herons crying out over the black lakes and you’ll be hearing the grouse and the owls with them and the larks and the big thrushes when the days are warm.” No soft words here. These people have too bitter a time of it and for the most part their dreaming is kept to themselves. Yet they do dream luxurious fables—a a woman in the dark night summons up houses of gold and speckled horses and is wakened by the cold and the dripping thatch and a donkey braying. Synge’s empathy with nature was uncanny. He did not merely describe storms, he lived them and induces us to live them with him; the canvas boat rolling and vaulting; at one moment being plunged down into the furrow of the dark green water, then flung up into the air and looking down on the heads of the rowers as if on a ladder, or splayed across , a forest of white sea-crests, the struggling men like centaurs, and all the time his fear countered with a strange exhilaration, on account of being so close to death.

  He is a naturalist, botanist, poet and storyteller all in one. You have to live a lonely and self-immolating existence to be as aware as that. The loneliness at times was transmuted into a kind of reckless ecstasy so that in the miasma of rain and grayness we find him on a rock in Aran absorbing the luminous warmth of the sun, seeing the island itself as a jewel, the bay almost too blue to look at, a white cirrus of gulls’ wings, a shift from darkness to blinding brightness. Reading it one feels the correspondence between the outer light and his own mood, a sudden deliverance from despondency. He believed that some places make for dementia. He had a liking for mad things. Barbaric stories fascinated him. One was of a man in Wicklow, who after a few whiskies stripped off his clothes, went into the glens and was found days later, the crows feeding on him. When a writer chooses a theme he is merely amplifying his inner affinities. This silent drifting man had
in him the makings of a murderer. Murder first occurred to him as a young man when he renounced his faith and in the doing renounced his mother. Born into this pious family where the Bible was read each evening, his company comprising his mother and grand-mother and a tutor, he seemed the perfectly shy, dutiful youngest son. Then at the age of twelve a crisis of faith: he read Darwin and upon learning that a human hand was a genetic development from a bat’s wing, he renounced Christianity, betrayed Christ and believed himself to be a Judas. Incest and parricide were what struck him, as they did Proust, but whereas Proust turned his pathology into a glorious labyrinthine elegy, Synge followed the fates of the outlawed and the savage.

  In life he was always contriving to distance himself from the mother with whom he could not make a complete break. When she died from a growth similar to his, he commemorated her in a rare fit of bathos, and this no less to his betrothed, Molly Allgood. When he was not wandering in the glens or in Aran, Synge stayed with his mother in County Wicklow and his one really determined effort to leave her, in his late thirties, has in it all the flurry of improvisation. Old pieces of furniture and books were flung onto a cart that was covered with a tarpaulin, clumsily secured, so that everything got wet. He arrived in a terraced house in Dublin to be closer to his sweetheart but did not stay long. As a lover, he was prey to the same suspicions as most; he took umbrage upon hearing that Molly was seen linking an actor called Dossy Wright and scorned her excuse about a sprained ankle, insisting she was as well able to keep on her feet as anyone he knew. His sexual hungers were great, and a few days after their weekly tryst in the Dublin mountains he would describe himself to her in a letter as “a very starving man.” Sometimes he became a little craven, was ready to go down on his knees to her shadow, then at other times he cancelled meetings at the last minute to accommodate his family yet sat in his room imagining her footfall.