Singing Synge’s praises

THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD, Lowry Guays

I’ve always had a problem with this most acclaimed of J M Synge’s darkly-comic plays.

It has seemed to me that the story is a little patronising, suggesting, as the middle-class Irishman seemed to do, that the rural Irish are generally pretty stupid.

In fact, it seems the problem was always that I hadn’t seen particularly good productions.
This one, you might say, is the real thing — one Irish paper called director Garry Hynes’s Playboy the definitive version, even though she has played with it a few times since it was the opening show of her then-new, Galway-based, Druid Theatre Company back in the Seventies. But you get the idea.

And it certainly has an authentic whiff to it. From the dirt floor of the rural alehouse to its rotten doors, filthy walls and peat fire heaped in a corner, this is what we would expect of rural anywhere at the turn of the last century.

Synge was the poet of the Irish playwrights, turning his rough characters into fully-rounded and here often very funny people by giving them wonderful lines.

It is here, with these strong Irish accents and temperaments, that the play finally comes to life. We understand how a simpleton with an extraordinary confession can become admired by people around him, whose lives barely stretch to the excitement of donkey races on the sands; how his timidity over a heinous crime can seem fascinating to girls whose local male stock is more scared of the local priest than fond of the local women.

With his new-won adulation, Christy — wonderfully performed by Aaron Monaghan — moves from quiet idiot to late-blooming hunk, only to be knocked back down to earth by the appearance of his not-at-all dead father, the adulation of the locals dissipating almost as quickly as it arises.

I still have a problem with the production, which seems to impose very little on the actors, who sometimes do little more than stand and shout at each other. But with performances as generally good as these, who’s complaining? From Monaghan to the likes of Derbhle Crotty (brilliant as the feisty young widow Quinn) and Andrew Bennett and John Olohan as Christy’s battered father and Pegeen’s drunken father respectively, this is a bleakly funny visit to a genuine classic.

To Saturday.