The Abbey Theatre

1. The Abbey Theatre and Synge’s Playboy of the Western World

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.’

9. 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

10. 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”.

11. 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.

12. 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

13. 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 story-teller’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 ink-horn 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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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