Players present ‘Playboy of the Western World’
GREYSTONES Players present JM Synge’s ‘ The Playboy of the Western World’ at Whale Theatre on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, April 26 to 28, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, April 29 at 4 p.m.
The Players’ previous productions of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa in May 2017 and Connections, an evening of one-act plays, in November 2017 both sold out well in advance. Christy Mahon is played by Cian Hall, while Anneka Keating takes on the role of Pegeen Mike Flaherty, and Shirley O’Keeffe the Widow Quin.
Set in a small village on the coast of Mayo, Playboy opens when a young man on the run staggers into a local shebeen where he is given shelter.
When the man, Christy Mahon, reveals that he has killed his father, he achieves instant celebrity among the local community and begins to attract the attentions of the local women. The publican’s daughter Pegeen, despite being engaged to the well-off but timid and priest-fearing Shawn Keogh (Eoin O’Mahony), is captivated by Christy – and even the predatory Widow Quin sets her sights on him.
But Christy also attracts the suspi- cion of the local self-appointed sleuth and, in an ironic twist to the tale, his fortunes change dramatically. Although The Playboy of the Western World, like Synge’s other masterpiece Riders to the Sea (1904), is set in the west, it is particularly appropriate to present it in Greystones as he spent every summer of his childhood in what was at the time just a quiet fishing village.
Synge was also an avid photographer, and he took a wealth of photographs of the county while on cycling tours of Wicklow.
The 1907 premier of this irreverent comic masterpiece in the Abbey Theatre was met with rioting and controversy. Seeing the colourful language as blasphemous and the dynamic characters as caricatures, the audience took the play as an affront to the honour and dignity of the Irish and missed Synge’s subtle ironies, crafted interweaving of tone and plot, and beautiful re-workings of traditional imagery. Jack Yeats warned Synge that if he wanted to keep any of his ‘coloured language’ in the play, he would have to ‘station a drummer in the wings, to welt the drums every time the language gets too high for the stomachs of the audience.’ Tickets are €15 from whaletheatre.ie.