Fiction · 1905
The Well of the Saints
A Comedy in Three Acts
Martin and Mary Doul, a blind married couple, have built a whole contented life on the stories they tell each other about their own good looks — stories no one has the heart, or the interest, to correct. When a wandering saint's holy water restores their sight, they get exactly what they never really wanted: an honest look at each other, at their own age and ugliness, and at a world too harsh to live in with eyes open.
J. M. Synge's tragicomedy premiered at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1905, drawing on the same western-Irish speech and material — gathered from his own repeated visits to the Aran Islands — that would shape The Playboy of the Western World two years later, though its ending, in which the couple choose blindness again over an intolerable clarity, is a bleaker joke than that later play's.
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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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