The Playboy of the Western World (New Mermaids) - Softcover

Synge, John Millington; Kelsall, Malcolm

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0713643226 ISBN 13: 9780713643220

Publisher: Methuen Drama, 1997

Synopsis

Synge, who came from a middle-class Protestant family near Dublin, created a huge scandal at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where The Playboy was staged in 1907, because its audience did not take kindly to a comedy that seemed to portray the Irish as violent, superstitious sots and swaggerers. Synge relied on and at the same time mocked the Irish dramatic movement and its ambition to create realistic drama that was also poetically beautiful. The play is set 'near a village, on a wild coast of Mayo'. On the first day, a stranger arrives and declares that he is on the run because he has killed his father - for this, the villagers turn him into a hero. On the second day, however, his father arrives walking wounded, and although Christy knocks him down with a spade, his father seems impossible to kill. The set off together, still quarrelling, and the villagers are bereft of their excitement.

About this title

About the Author:

John Millington Synge was born in 1871, of Anglo-Irish Protestant land owning stock. He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, and then spent a few years wandering on the continent. Synge went to the Aran Islands in 1898, and subsequently revisited them several times. In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea were both completed in the summer of 1902, and both were taken from material he had collected on the islands. The Playboy of the Western World, in which a young man lies about the death of his father offended audiences when first produced in 1907, on account of its 'immodest' references to Irish womanhood and aroused a prolonged and bitter controversy, which lasted until the author's death in 1909. His other works include a few poems and two books of travels The Aran Islands. Deirdre of the Sorrows was published posthumously.

Review:

'The play is constructed like a perfectly sprung fat gold watch, whose loud tick can still be heard in almost every Irish play written since its Dublin premiere in 1907.'
Lyn Gardner, Guardian, 9.5.09

About this edition

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0713643226
• ISBN 13: 9780713643220
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144