THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD BY JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE AT THE LYRIC THEATRE, BELFAST, OCTOBER 2019
THE
PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD by JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE
At
the
LYRIC
THEATRE
On
the 10th October 2019
The Lyric seems committed
to offering us a snapshot of the slow evolution of Irish theatre as last years The
Colleen Bawn by Dion Boucicault gives way to The Playboy of the Western
World by J.M.Synge. Boucicault’s
drama was sneered at and dismissed by both Shaw and, J.M.Synge’s friend,
W.B.Yeats because of its pretentious use of snippets of Irish, stock characters
and stereotypes, stage Irishmen and Irishwomen and its limited relevance beyond
the theatre. In short, Boucicault was
producing an image of Ireland for consumption in America and at this he was
very adept, his plays were immensely commercially successful even if they
failed to please his critics. Yeats,
with his remote, aristocratic stance looked upon the peasantry as a hindrance
to civilisation and Synge too looked upon their manners and mores with a glint
of satiric intent. But his actual target
was not the peasantry but the presumptions and prejudices that largely
summarised the attitude of middle-class Dubliners to the countryside. They imagined the countryside to be pastoral
and idyllic, an Eden they could idealise but never return to.
In the Lyric’s production
sound design is reduced to a minimum, there is minimal use of diegetic sound
and no non-diegetic sound whatsoever.
The directorial decision seems to have been to allow Synge’s language to
speak for itself, like a single malt whisky poured through spring water rather
than lemonade or coke. Indeed, the
language requires close attention since there are many colloquialisms, use of
archaic language and colourful Irishisms.
For instance, Christy Mahon, the play’s protagonist, disclaims that he
‘riz a loy’ (in order to strike his father dead), it requires a certain
linguistic intuition to see ‘raised’ and then ‘a loy’? Well it’s a rural spade for digging peat,
these are now found in museums and folk parks. There may even be some in the west of Ireland
still being used. In fact, its probably
a certainty (readers in England may not realise that there are few peat bogs on
the east coast of Ireland where the cities, Belfast, Dublin and Cork happen to
be. This also led Oliver Cromwell to
declare ‘the Irish can go to Hell or Connaught’ because he knew full well that
Connaught, in the west, had no fertile ground, just peat bogs and poor land for
grazing sheep and growing spuds.)
The mise en scene is also
sparse. The action takes place in a
shebeen (a kind of rural tavern in Ireland where illicit poteen was often sold,
a strong liquor made from potatoes. The
brew was outlawed in 1661 and was illegal right up to the 1990s. Poteen was very often brewed in local
breweries by amateurs, its alcohol content was therefore unregulated, and it
could have an excessive alcohol content which might cause blindness among other
ailments.). The shebeen is updated,
there is a microwave oven beside the drinks and Pegeen Mike’s bedroom is
integrated into the set, an expansion of space unique to this production. The fact that she has her own space
underlines her independence but also counterpoints her credulity at Christy’s
shocking story of parricide. The play
has only one location and this makes us pay attention to the language which is
a very pleasing and precise rendition of the brogues found in the west of
Ireland in Synge’s time. The grammar
structure of the sentences often seems influenced by the presumed presence of
Irish which gives it a lilting, musical character that Synge, in his
introduction, magnanimously attributes to the collective, communal nature of
all art rather than to his own role as artificer. Unlike Boucicault, Synge does not include
fragments of Irish but attempts to translate the Irish language into a robustly
comprehensible English.
The three unities of
time, space and action are observed, and the play’s radical message is often contrasted
with the conservatism of its form. The
ghosts of Aristotle and Sophocles are present in the play’s absences as
Aristotle’s unities are used to untie a Sophoclean knot.
In short, Christy has
committed parricide, his father is at once corporeal and symbolic. Christy must somehow remove his father in
order to re-insert himself into the symbolic order. His father also symbolises an ancient play
re-configured in the era of Freud and Lacan whereby the father monopolises the
women and the son must rebel by murdering or castrating the father. The play never descends into such analysis
but the immorality of the locals who believe Christy’s story incredulously led
to the rioting which marred the play’s premiere in 1907 and made it famous in a
European and a world context. Perhaps
Synge uncovered pagan practices underneath the veneer of Christian piety when
he visited the Aran Islands in Galway Bay to write a series of articles for the
Manchester Guardian accompanied by the artist Jack B Yeats.
The key words that sum up
this production are loyalty, fidelity and obedience to the playwright’s
original intentions. We are given a
glimpse of theatre in the era before Stanislavsky and Brecht. The fourth wall is never violated, there are
no direct addresses to the audience, the plot is related through action and
character rather than being telegraphed in advance as in a Brecht play. The cast is terribly obedient to the
director’s intentions and the director to the author even though he happens to
be dead. Some of the language is dead
also like the word ‘shrift’ which caused some of the trouble in 1907. Originally it referred to women’s
undergarments, also ‘playboy’ originally meant ‘practical joker’ or
‘hoaxer’. Michael Shea is Christy Mahon
and his performance is vital and ecstatic as is Eloise Stevenson as Pegeen Mike
but perhaps if they rebelled a bit more the production might resemble the
original, or even the response it engendered.
Ultimately Oonagh Murphy,
the director, has taken the play’s conventions literally and produced a picture
postcard that we can send to our relatives about ‘The Playboy’. However, it is not the play that Synge
intended, the one that caused rioting, shock and scandal in Dublin.
Paul Murphy, Lyric
theatre, Belfast, October 2019
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