Fiction · 1907
The Playboy of the Western World
A Comedy in Three Acts
Christy Mahon staggers into a remote pub on the Mayo coast confessing, in a kind of daze, that he has just killed his own father with a spade — and instead of being turned over to the law, he finds himself the toast of the whole village, above all of the publican's sharp-tongued daughter Pegeen Mike, who has never met a man so thrillingly capable of anything. His new celebrity survives right up until his father, very much alive and furious, walks back into the story.
J. M. Synge's comedy, first performed at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1907, provoked real riots among audiences who took its unromantic, mocking portrait of Irish rural life — and its casual treatment of patricide as a good story — as a slander on the nation the new Irish theatre was supposed to be celebrating. It is now regarded as the Abbey's greatest play.
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About the author
1871–1909 · Victorian
John Millington Synge (1871–1909) was born near Dublin to a Protestant landowning family, studied at Trinity College Dublin, and spent several restless years in Germany, Italy, and Paris before W. B. Yeats, whom he met there in 1896, urged him to return to Ireland and find his subject among its own people. Synge's repeated visits to the Aran Islands, off the Galway coast, gave him both the material and the rhythms of peasant speech that shaped his plays for the Irish National Theatre, which he helped found with Yeats and Lady Gregory and which became the Abbey Theatre in 1904. The Playboy of the Western World (1907), his best-known work, provoked riots at its Abbey premiere over its frank, unromantic portrait of Irish rural life; The Well of the Saints (1905) had already shown the same unsentimental eye. He died in Dublin of Hodgkin's disease at thirty-seven, before completing his final play, Deirdre of the Sorrows.
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