The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays

by J.M. Synge, Robert Welch (Afterword), Edna O'Brien (Introduction)

This volume from one of Ireland's greatest playwrights includes "In the Shadow of the Glen," "Riders to the Sea," and "The Playboy of the Western World."

Genres: Plays, Drama, Ireland, Irish Literature, Classics, Theatre, Fiction

160 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1907

About the author

Edmund John Millington Synge (pronounced /sɪŋ/) was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore. He was one of the cofounders of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for the play The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots during its opening run at the Abbey theatre. Synge wrote many well known plays, including "Riders to the Sea", which is often considered to be his strongest literary work.

Although he came from an Anglo-Irish background, Synge's writings are mainly concerned with the world of the Roman Catholic peasants of rural Ireland and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view.

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh wonderful wordplay! Read these lively passages and understand why Synge's work is still in print and why he continues to be regarded as a great Irish playwright. He did not live long and he wrote too little, but he left behind these works. Synge was an educated man from a bourgeois home, but he traveled around rural Ireland and fell in love with the colorful language and characters he encountered.

"In the Shadow of the Glen" and "Riders to the Sea" are one act plays. The first one is pretty funny, and concerns a tramp who turns up at a rural home as the man of the house is about to be buried - only it turns out he has not died yet, but is only faking it. The second piece is considerably darker, and focuses on a rural family whose sons keep drowning in various mishaps. The sea seems to stand in for the inescapable fate that awaits us all.

The real masterpiece here is "The Playboy of the Western World", and this play deserves a 5 star rating. In this, the playwright returns to the theme of a tramp turning up in a remote area and getting mixed up with the locals. In this case it is Christy Mahon, a young and seemingly foolish fellow who is fleeing his home after killing his father. (SPOILER ALERT) Strangely enough, the locals respond to him with awe and protect him. Attractive young ladies and a wily widow come after him with romance in mind. Apparently, some audience members in 1907 were offended by this, and there was a fair amount of controversy. However, all is not as it seems, and his da eventually shows up with a big bandage on his head (Christy had succeeded only in knocking him unconscious, not killing him as he had assumed) looking to thrash his son and drag him home. The real star of the show is Synge's language, drawn from the slang of rural Ireland, which crackles with wit and poetic energy. I would like to see a good production of this someday.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Six plays which deserve to be known better! All are relatively short (a couple of them are only one act long) but they are intense dramas, and instantly claimed a home in my memory. Synge's characters are largely the rural and peasant folk of country Ireland, many of them outcasts or dissenters of some sort (tinkers, tramps, fugitives etc) but blessed with glorious and lively imaginations, and a musical idiom to match. In presenting the world through their observant and often subversive eyes (!) Synge at once entertains but also exposes and challenges forces of domination and repression (such as the Church, or the English). A must-read for any one interested in Irish Literary or Cultural history, and anyone interested in the history of Drama/the Stage.

[Ivy-Mabel Fling · Rating 5 out of 5]

A rather strange play. Perhaps it needs to be read twice or three times!

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 'Deirdre of the Sorrows', Synge has the eponymous Deirdre claim that 'It is not a small thing to be rid of grey hairs and the loosening of the teeth'. Clearly, for Synge, it's a huge asset, and I finished reading his collection of plays almost relieved for his sake that he died young. He has an absolutely morbid disgust for ageing, and it's ramped up to eleven for ageing in women.

As pieces of work, I liked Deirdre of the Sorrows best. It's probably not a coincidence that it's the play with the least of the Irish 'cant', because the characters aren't supposed to be peasants. Unlike the (annoyingly) English annotator, I didn't have any difficulty with the rhythm or comprehension of the dialogue, but whoa does he ever overplay his hand with it. 'Do be' is an emphasiser. 'I do be going to Mass' does not mean the same as 'I'm going to Mass' or 'I go to Mass a lot'. Sean O'Casey and Maeve Binchy understand this a lot better. Still, I can appreciate that at the time of writing no one was transcribing Hiberno-English, so fair deuce to him for havin' a go, like.

All through 'The Well of the Saints' I kept being distracted from The Moral by the fact that congenitally blind people would not be able to resolve a face into a face from a wall of colours and shapes, based on modern research, nor would they have any real concept of the 'beauty/ugliness' dichotomy.

I failed to understand The Moral of 'Playboy of the Western World' at ALL. I do, however, remark that Synge is as fond of insta-love as any ha'penny romance writer.

From 'Riders to the Sea':

"There was Patch after was drowned out of a curagh that turned over. I was sitting here with Bartley, and he a baby, lying on my two knees, and I seen two women, and three women, and four women coming in, and they crossing themselves, and not saying a word. I looked out then, and there were men coming after them, and they holding a thing in the half of a red sail, and water dripping out of it - it was a dry day, Nora - and leaving a track to the door."

That is good, now.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only two plays in thus far (reading it for a class I'm auditing, before I go to the holy land, I hopeahopeahope) and they're both fantastic.

I have this thing with reading plays, probably everybody does, wherein the reading of the play creates this kind of Platonic ideal of what its perfect performance would be like- inflections, gesticulations, actors, stage settings, etc. And so, in a way, I don't really even want to see them performed onstage or on film. And yet, of course, I do so very much...

Playboy of the Western World was exactly as good as I'd always imagined it would be. Vivacious, alternately comic, absurd, deeply felt, and somewhat despairing. Antic and febrile but shot through with wonderful poetic sympathy and cultural flavor. Synge caused a scandal, and why not? He satirized a certain angle of the Irish world at the time, though his goal was for the audience to laugh at the scenes onstage with all their buffoonery and caricature and instead the audience took a teeth-gritting whoozisazzholetrynafool attitude, tearing it up at the Abbey Theatre the first week (!) it was performed. The actors, including the brilliant brothers Fay, had to get to the end in dumbshow.

***

Docked a star because some of the longer plays began to get wearying, but Synge has got a fan in me.

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 4 out of 5]

These were three plays about peasant farces in rural Ireland; Synge spent apparently most of his life living in the remotest Irish villages he could find to fully research this language and way of life. The result is a very lively dialogue style that leads into plausible if pretty comical adventures with massive conclusions that tend to resemble greek tragedy (as well as the Expressionism to come), with plays on hospitality, the war of the sexes, familial relations reverred to apocalyptic heights. It's an interesting approach and apparently fairly unique; the closest I think is Flannery O'Connor's tales, with the thick dialect and frightening symbolic conclusions. These plays were apparently all staged in the Irish theatre revival, and it's a shame that Yeats plays are so hard to find in any readable format, since he seemed to be trying to do the same project of recapitulating the Irish mythos into a new literary format, but from the other angle, with all sorts of esoteric symbols and deliberately unreal, phantom-like characters. With Synge, the up&down wild ride of Playboy of the Western World is the popular favorite, that has Freudian and also Christian parallels (main character is 'CHRISTy' after all) along with its true realist style; but I enjoyed the one-act Shadow of the Glen a great deal, which was just as wild about its battle of the sexes

[T. Tokunaga · Rating 2 out of 5]

【Plays of John M. Synge / ed. Sanki Ichikawa / Kenkyu-sha, 1923】

This collection is an annotated Japan-retail version of Synge's plays in English, namely, The Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea, The Well of the Saints, The Tinker's Wedding and The Playboy of the Western World.

It also includes a minute and considerate explanations of how Synge was reputed to be in 1923 (even though it's a reprint much later), and it actually pointed out that he often compared his works to his influences, Medieval farces.

I've actually read a bit of Medieval farces in Japanese translation way back when, and I can fully tell you that it's really - especially the still canonized The Playboy of the Western World is - a Medieval farce set in post-Boer War Ireland, especially from its overly explicit and often hyperbolic gags.

--Widow Quin. If you will, you'd have a right to have him fresh and nourished in place if nursing a feast. (p. 149.)

--Widow Quin. You've a right to be destroyed indeed, with your walking, and fighting, and facing the sun. (p. 170.)

Its focus on physicality of languages and rich vocabulary in phrases without so-called big words are also great particularities of farces, especially from Medieval France. But it doesn't mean I like these plays very much - it's actually pretty unsettling to see they're set around 1900.

[Philippine · Rating 4 out of 5]

J'ai lu l'adaptation française de Françoise Morvan qui a pour moi excellé à restituer la justesse du travail de J.M. Synge, dans les dialogues, mais aussi dans l'usage de l'argot et du gaélique. J'ai particulièrement apprécié les précisions apportées et le souci du détail de la traductrice, qui nous plonge un peu plus encore dans l'univers de l'auteur, notamment l'explication du titre, qui ne fait pas référence au monde occidental, mais à l'ouest de l'Irlande, un monde déjà inconnu et fantasmé des villageois irlandais de l'est.

[Gavin · Rating 2 out of 5]

three somewhat tedious plays that constantly had me looking to see how many pages there were left to read. I've read a fair amount of drama lately so I guess my standards have become higher and my tolerance lower. Couldn't really get into the plots or the characters

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The words are the lyrics of life.

This is like reading along with the lyrics. You can hear the words in your own mind. Listen to the music.

[Allyson Frances · Rating 3 out of 5]

just really love that people rioted over this

[Maddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of the three plays, I liked Riders to The Sea the best. It would have probably been four stars if it was by itself. I didn't like the other two plays as much.

[Jimgosailing · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Are you coming to be killed a third time, or what ails you now?”

“There’s a great gap between a gallows story and a dirty deed.”

As to Playboy of the Western World, as I was reading it, I thought “meh” - except for the language- the language! Synge’s capturing of the local manner of speaking is phenomenal (reminds me of Faulkner’s capturing southern cadence and idioms). [wonder what Synge would have thought of the recent translations from Gaelic to English of The Dirty Dust/Cre na Cille].

But as I thought about the tale, I saw the folkloric elements emerge, especially as Christy embellishes his tale with each telling; the elevation to hero status (an unknown who claims to have killed his da) just to be as quickly thrown down. Interesting points of gender swapping (the mirror, the boots, the shaw and petticoat)

To hear the language, I watched the movie directed by Brian Desmond Hurst and it was wonderful to hear it spoken, though it certainly helped to have the text {and I knew I recognized the actor who play The Playboy (Gary Raymond) but couldn’t figure out what I’d seen him in before to be memorable enough to recognize him…and IMBD shares he was in the 1960s TV series The Rat Patrol.}. There’s a nice clip on YouTube with Cillian Murphy as Christy.

[update: reading Ulysses Annotated and in note 10.936 (245.16) on “Lynchehaun” it describes a James Walshe who assaulted and almost killed a woman on Achill Island who was captured and tried, escaped to America who refused to extradite, who subsequently returned to Ireland in disguise and managed to escape again before being caught; and he became one of the models for Christy in this play.]

In The Shadow of the Glen is a stark examination of a loveless marriage in which a younger woman married an older man out of financial necessity and you can see they’re living in a remote spot and barely getting by, but he’s suspicious of her engaging with passers by, she’s been skimming money she hides, he feigns death and catches her plotting remarriage with a younger man and kicks her out.

Riders to the Sea presents the bleak reality of scrabbling out an existence against the forces of nature. Regarded as one of the best one act tragedies. Also an interesting exploration of the tension (?) of transitioning from paganism to Christianity.

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Playboy of the Western World, Deirdre of the Sorrows, and Riders to the Sea are some of the finest twentieth century plays that I have ever read. Collectively, they demonstrate the plasticity of J. M. Synge as a playwright, for each represents a distinct sort of drama. Playboy is a three-act magnum opus that serves up comedy, tragedy, and romance all at once; Deirdre of the Sorrows is a tragic epic not unlike Macbeth, inspired by a well-known pre-Christian Irish myth; Riders to the Sea, unlike the former two plays, is a mere one act, and communicates the rather quotidian, while nonetheless catastrophic, misfortunes that befall the simple people of the Aran Islands better than any other work of prose or poetry produced in all Ireland. Be it the Kiltartanese—that is, the literary dialect pioneered by Lady Gregory in which Synge renders the Irish language in English—the unexpected twists and turns, the absurdity, the un-distilled characterization of Irish peasant life, the pathos of the romance, the power of the speeches, or the distinctly Irish sense of melancholy that pervades all his work—there are a whole host of reasons to consider these plays masterpieces. The other plays in this collection, The Shadow of the Glen, The Tinker’s Wedding, and The Well of Saints, are also exceptional works of drama, if not of the same artistic achievement of the three plays mentioned above.

“Well, it’s a clean bed and soft with it, and it’s great luck and company I’ve won me in the end of time—two fine women fighting for the likes of me—till I’m thinking this night wasn’t I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in years gone by,” Christy famously wonders aloud in Playboy of the Western World. In just a few lines, even when read out of context, one can appreciate the vivacity of Synge’s drama. I highly encourage the reader to immerse herself in Synge’s catalogue, all too often overlooked by students and literary critics alike. His plays—Irish to their collective core—communicate Irish identity just so singularly well.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language" was one verdict* on The Playboy of the Western World; "an unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant men, and worse still upon Irish girlhood" was another.** Synge's most famous play was, it seems, not the only one to attract condemnation, with The Shadow of the Glen being described as "a slur on Irish womanhood".*** More than one hundred years on and a world away, the passion behind this almost viscerable outrage is hard for me to share, but not entirely incomprehensible. These six plays - and they are all worth reading, with the not-quite chronological order in this volume seeming, to this wholly non-expert reader, quite natural - are undoubtedly provocative, although I found myself prodded to alternating frustration and admiration less by political and moral considerations than by Synge's genre-bending tonal shifts, and his spectacular use of language. I'm not wholly convinced by his stage-craft, with a few of the plays just stopping rather than ending, but what language! As Synge's actors testified, it must have been hugely difficult to perform, but on the page it is wonderfully rich and evocative, as well as feeling convincing and deeply rooted. Synge must have had a great ear. Riders to the Sea, The Shadow of the Glen, and Deirdre of the Sorrows were the highlights for me, followed by Playboy, and with The Tinker's Wedding and The Well of the Saints bringing up the rear.

*That of Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin.
** The Freeman's Journal
*** Griffith again
All this from Wikipedia. Make of that what you will.

[Gille Liath · Rating 3 out of 5]

What Synge managed to do was ‘translate’ the Gaelic spoken in Western Ireland in his time into a distinctive and poetic-sounding medium for drama. What he did not manage to do was write great plays. The early works such as the title piece have an austere beauty, like a medieval mystery play, but are not fleshed out enough – they are little more than tableaux. And the later, longer pieces, in spite of the time he took writing and re-writing them, have a lot of tiresome passages (as well as some good ones). He has the medium, but not strong or beautiful enough things to say in it; a ‘poetic’ feel, but not actual poetry. And perhaps he is loading the simple folk tales on which they are based with more weight than they can carry.

_Deirdre of the Sorrows_, his last work, is a little different: based on an ancient tale of mythic resonance, in it Synge is reaching for something of Shakespearean grandeur and greatness. It’s a worthy attempt but, for me, both his ideas and his language fall a little bit short. And I can’t help feeling there’s something slightly ludicrous about the climactic scene, where Naisi stands talking to Deirdre while his brothers are slaughtered. Hang on a mo!

I still think the best thing he wrote is his travelogue, _The Aran Islands_. That is real, and fascinating: try as he might, there is something a little bit arch about these plays. But they are still interesting, as being the closest you can get to experiencing the old Irish speech without actually speaking Irish. And maybe they’re better to watch than to read: I don’t know, not having seen any of them produced.

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once, when midnight smote the air,
Eunuchs ran through Hell and met
On every crowded street to stare
Upon great Juan riding by:
Even like these to rail and sweat
Staring upon his sinewy thigh.

So Yeats says "On Those that hated 'The Playboy of the Western World,' 1907," by which it appears that if we don't want to be damned eunuchs, in Yeats's opinion, we need to try to appreciate Synge.
Synge is, then, interesting. He is a playwright who deals unapologetically with the supernatural, and intensely with the unlovable: there are a bunch of nasty human beings and a veritably Greek amount of miracles (miracles which don't seem to do much good for anybody) in these little plays.
The language is interesting: the syntax is a sort of hyper-Irish that even the early actors couldn't read without lots of practice. The psychology is a kind of a Shakespearian magnifying glass: here is what you'd look like if you had no restrictions, it seems to say.
Here, perhaps, is life, sinewy thighs and all.

[Leslie Wexler · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a hilarious play. Christy is the "playboy of the western world" - in its first evocation by the Widow Quin its spoken slant and chafingly. As he gains his street cred (beyond the urban mythology growing around the killing of his father) he is heralded as town hero and engages in the lyricism of love with Pegeen - until his father shows up and defames him yelling, "Is this the playboy of the western world" - spoken contemptuously by the crowd.

In the end, resurrected a second time, his Mahon and Christy quit the town, and with them take their poetry and story - Christy is made a man in that moment and walks away from Mayo's contempt for theatricality and poetry. Pegeen, the pot-boy once more, covers her head and grieves to have lost the only thing that saved her from the mundane and gave her poetry, she lost "the only playboy of the western world."

[Jean Carlton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This enjoyable detour in my reading resulted from references in Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor about the famous 1907 play by. J.M. Synge. Dubbed a 'comic masterpiece' it tells the story of a man that becomes a town hero - much sought after by all the young women - after boasting that he murdered his father! Riots greeted the first performance perhaps proving that all publicity is good publicity.
I listened to the radio broadcast version by L.A Theatre Works via audiobooks (Overdirve)from my county library. I'm sure that listening vs. reading this play greatly enhanced the experience it being wonderfully delivered in Irish brogue (acclaimed performance starring Orson Bean and Alley Mills)

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

These six plays, some only of one act, whether tragedy or comedy, are a wonderful evocation of Irish rural life over a century ago. Synge’s use of the ‘Hiberno-English’ he heard in his travels in western Ireland makes for vivid and often racey, even poetic dialogue. His plots challenge the prudishness and sentimentality about peasant life in the Ireland of his time and still make powerful drama. I have not yet seen any of his plays performed, but I have found them a pleasure to read.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

"...And I run up with a pat of butter, for it'd be a poor thing to have you eating your spuds dry, and you after running a great way since you did destroy your da"

-Susan Brady to Christopher 'Christy' Mahon, Playboy of the Western World

[StrangeBedfellows · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't enjoy reading plays, which is likely the reason why I rated this as only a 2-star book. Reading preferences aside, the plays are entertaining. If read this in a class setting -- as I did -- there's a lot of wonderful material here to analyze and discuss.

[Drew Heverin · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the drama is compelling when you find yourself identifying with one of Synge's characters, I found it mundane and boring for the most part. But this drama, like most in the era, probably relies on seeing the performance instead of reading alone in your house.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

pretty entertaining until the end. .. HATED the ending. . .

[Caren Nicholas · Rating 3 out of 5]

You've got to love the Irish when you read "Playboy" I especially liked that it was set in Couty Mayo where my dad's family comes from. We're an interesting race!

[Bernard Norcott-mahany · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe in reading this again this weekend I'll revise this view, but I didn't see much of the comedy here.

[Brian]

Read "Riders to the Sea" in August 2012.

[The Scrivener's Quill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read "Playboy of the Western World" a fun lively play about getting out from under parents strings and winning glory sufficient to be worthy of marriage.

[Jono McDermott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny, inventive, insightful, important.

[Dylan Rock · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing selection of one if Ireland's greatest dramatist work