The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays (16 page)

Riders to the Sea
was written during 1902 and produced, again at Molesworth Hall, on 25 February 1904. It was based on incidents that occurred during Synge's stays on Irishmaan in 1900 and 1901.
In the Shadow
envisions release from dead routine through life on the open road, but
Riders to the Sea
evokes a pagan and material world where there is no escape from iron fate.

It is a masterpiece of concentration and structure. Maurya is awaiting news of her son Michael, who has not returned from the sea. A body has been washed ashore in Donegal (the play is set on one of the Aran Islands) and a shirt and a stocking taken from the body have been sent south. This is the bundle carried by Nora, one of the daughters, as she enters at the start of the play. Leaning against the wall are the boards ready for Michael's coffin. Suddenly the door, which she has only half closed, is blown violently open by a surge of Atlantic wind, establishing immediately the frailty and vulnerability of life lived in a tiny cottage beaten by oceanic winds and of the boats smashed by terrible seas in which men are drowned continually. Maurya, in a dire catalogue at the close of the play, tells us that she has lost her husband, her husband's father, and six sons to the sea: eight men in all. The play brings before us the drowning of her last son, Bartley, who is to be buried in the boards brought for Michael's coffin.

Fate is inexorable, as is the market. Maurya's first words, when she enters and sees Cathleen, her other daughter, hiding the bundle containing Michael's clothes in the turf loft, are: “Isn't it turf enough you have for this day and evening?” (p. 31). This opening rebuke underlines the harshness and poverty of Aran life, a life very far from the paradisal view of the west. Cathleen tells her mother that she wants the extra turf to make sure the bread is baked for Bartley before he crosses over to Connemara on the mainland to sell the red mare and the gray pony. And this, in a sure structural development, moves into the acrimonious debate as to whether Bartley should go sailing with the wind rising up from the northeast, a bad sign. But just as Maurya has to be watchful about the turf, in this pitilessly harsh economy, Bartley cannot miss the opportunity to get a good price for the horses in Connemara. It is not just the sea, and fate, and chance that rule these lives—it is money also.

Nothing prevails against the bleak laws of this universe, even blessings or the priest, let alone the intimacy of family. What hope can there be of survival in a house where there are no men left to take to the sea to bring in the necessary food? Maurya, so preoccupied is she with the danger Bartley is submitting himself to in taking to the sea in bad weather, fails to bless him as he goes out the door, and the sisters forget to give him the freshly baked bread to take with him. There is a ritualistic implication at work that refers to benediction, communion, and the Eucharist, but only to emphasize the ineffectuality of these devices against real life.
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And what is real life is not just bad weather, but the conspiring of ill omen and unrelenting misfortune. In a futile attempt to right her omissions, Maurya goes down to the spring well to bless Bartley and give him the bread. Instead this act of Christian ritual is frozen by what she sees, “the fearfulest thing any person has seen, since the day Bride Dara seen the dead man with the child in his arms” (p. 39), as she describes it to her two daughters.

For what she saw at the spring well was the antithesis of rebirth, blessing, communion. She saw the riders to the sea, Bartley on the red mare (red is the color of the Celtic underworld, of the
sidh
, the fairies) and behind him, on the gray pony, her dead son Michael with new shoes on his feet.

The 1890s and the early 1900s saw a tremendous surge of interest in folklore and folk belief all over Europe, and Ireland was no exception: Hyde's Love Songs was but one instance of the research into and the publication of folklore. Synge was himself a student of folk belief, mythology, and legend and their role in Irish and Celtic culture; while he lived in Paris, he attended the lectures on these topics by the Celticist Henrí d‘Arbois de Jubainville at the Sor bonne. It will be clear from the above account, however, that Synge's dramatic integration of folk culture into his creative realization of the vulnerability of Aran life is no mere primitivist coloring. His use of folk culture and the survival within it of elements of pre-Christian practices and beliefs has two functions: to convey something of the absolute terror this mind experiences when confronted with evidence of a world beyond this one; and to confront his 1904 audience with the futility of Christian blessing against the dark forces of the world, no matter what they are, whether material or inscrutable.

The play was received badly by the critics but on the whole the audience loved it: on 26 February Joseph Holloway, the diarist and chronicler of virtually every Dublin play for decades, tells us that the audience responded to the final curtain with total silence, and that it could not applaud.
⁶

By contrast, when
The Playboy of the Western World
was staged on 26 January 1907 at the Abbey Theatre, there were riots. The riots came about because, once again, Synge used his considerable linguistic and dramatic powers to confront reality and to render it in scenes, transactions, and interchanges that relentlessly focus on the way things really are, not what his audience would like them to be. In the preface to this play, he wrote, “All art is a collaboration” (p. 1): between the language people use in their actual circumstances and the mind of the artist as he (or she) assembles form. The trouble was that
The Playboy,
instead of idealizing Irish country people, and confirming the Celtic pastoralism of Hyde and the political agenda of the likes of Arthur Griffith and Maud Gonne, attacked the notion that the Irish were in any way superior to those who governed them. Synge opens up a world of drunkenness, violence, and lawlessness in his version of County Mayo. This world bore no resemblance to the concept of Ireland promoted by what now had come to be called Sinn Féin. Sinn Féin ideology, insisting on the right of Ireland to self-governance and independence, enshrined an ideal of Irish manhood as virtuous, disciplined, and chivalrous while Irishwomen were perceived as being modest, restrained, and gentle.

No wonder
The Playboy
caused a riot. To many on the opening night it seemed as if Synge (suspect anyway because of his Anglo-Irish and Protestant clerical background) had gone out of his way to be offensive to Ireland and the Irish, and especially to the people of the west. His characters are priest-ridden, hypocritical, violent, and drunken, ready at one moment to idealize a killer and at the next to reject him, torture him, and inform upon him when it looks as if their erstwhile hero may draw trouble down on themselves.

Heroism itself, especially heroism associated with violence, is one of Synge's major themes; the other is sex. One of the things that
The Playboy
is about is the attraction of physical violence when it is used against an oppressive force: Christy Mahon's supposed slaying of his father, Old Mahon, (his “old man” in the Irish rural parlance). Synge is, blasphemously, playing here on Christy as the Christ-Man and Old Mahon as St. Paul's old man who dies in the sacrificial death of Christ the Redeemer. The audience of 1907 might not have gotten the undertones completely, but they would have smelled an atheistic rat beneath the attack on Irish peasantry.

The Mayo people, especially the girls, go crazy for this wild man from the south who has killed his da, and Synge, with total clear-sightedness, acknowledges the attractions of the idea of violence to timorous minds and dysfunctional communities: the violent man embodies what they can never be. The twist Synge gives this, of course, is that their hero worship is all very well as long as it is a story, but as soon as Old Mahon appears and Christy resolves to kill his da on their very doorstep, they turn on him. Synge is preparing his audience, many of whom were active in Sinn Féin and had come along in a restive mood in any case, with a representation of a very real dilemma. It is one thing to tell yourself and others stories of Ireland's valor and of the glory of conflict, but what will it be like actually to kill other people? As Pegeen says, at the end of the play: “there's a great gap between a gallows story and a dirty deed. (To MEN) Take him from this, or the lot of us will be likely put on trial for his deed to-day” (p. 121). These are views that would have been expressed in Dublin in 1916. Pegeen, incidentally, was played by Synge's fiancée, Molly Allgood, and their difficulties caused by their differences in class and religion (Molly was an orphan and Catholic) and the dominating presence of Synge's evangelical mother, Kathleen, are woven into the play's complex ventures into sexuality, the nature of maleness, and the problematic aspects of the sexual charge between men and women.

Christy is the playboy, in whom the masculine sexual impulses are “at play”: he plays at being the boy, the “boyo.” But he also plays in other fields. It should be recalled that, at this time in history, Sig mund Freud was developing his theories of sexual complexes and of the psychopathology of sex, and that Carl Jung was beginning work on the archetypal structure of the unconscious, which included analysis of the anima, as the feminine impulse, repressed in the male at a cost.

Act Two opens with a strange scene: Christy is looking at himself in the mirror, alone on stage, and he thinks that he has begun, physically, to change now that he has assumed the role of the hero who killed his da (the Freud connection is obvious). Looking into the mirror he says: “Didn't I know rightly I was handsome.... I'll be growing fine skin from this day, the way I'll have a soft lovely skin on me” (pp. 74-75). Now the girls arrive, Christy sees them through the window (he says, “Stranger girls” [p. 75], and Synge in this phrase acknowledges the strangeness of male/female encounters in highly charged states) and hides. They arrive, bearing gifts for the parricide hero, and are disappointed not to find him there. One of the girls wonders if the en crustations on his boots are blood, but Sara, bolder than the rest, says its just the rusty bog water, and pulls one on. Again Synge is deliberately turning his play into a play on boys and girls, what they are and how they look (mirrors again) and this theme of cross-dressing is another implication in the play of the shifting nature of sexual identity. While the audience would not necessarily be conscious of the theme, they would certainly not be too happy with this type of carrying-on. The transvestism theme returns at the end of the play, when Sara and the Widow Quin try to dress up Christy in one of Sara's petticoats so he can get away from the crowd, who now want to hang the hero they earlier elevated to superman status. This is what T. S. Eliot called “savage farce” when he attempted to describe the mixture of comedy, horror, grim cruelty, and irrepressive life in Marlowe's late play
The Jew of Malta
.
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The instability of sexual identity is linked to instability in the way communities perceive themselves and others; there is an instability of self-perception (Christy's not the man he thought he was, or is he?); and there is instability in others (Sara says of Pegeen: “Her like does often change” [p. 117]). And there is a great change coming over the playboy himself. It is, quite evidently, a play in which everything is shifting. Far from there being in it a vision of the west as charming, consoling, full of blarney, a friendly drink, and mild delight, with the odd frisson of violence to liven things up (as in John Ford's film
The Quiet Man
), Synge's west is dark, unpredictable, driven by sexual tensions and frustrations, where drink is a means of ensuring temporary oblivion from the chaos of suspicion, hatred, and petty greed. Is there such a thing as a personality or character at all? One of Synge's favorite locutions from Hiberno-English (“The likes of,” “her like,” “it's like I'm saying”) more than hints that what is thought of as identity may be no more than gestures of simulation rather than something ordained and laid down.

All of this goes to explain why an audience, packed with Sinn Féin adherents, found this play offensive. So that when Christy says he wouldn't give Pegeen for “a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself” (p. 119), there had been so much shifting about and inference and insinuation going on that they were ready to blow. And there was total uproar, because the audience did not know what kind of Ireland this was that Synge was presenting to them. In all kinds of ways, their reaction was entirely understandable. This was an insult to Irish womanhood, Irish civility, Irish hospitality, Irish goodness. There were shouts of “Sinn Féin forever,” “Bring out the author and we'll deal with him,” “This is not the west.”
⁸

On the opening night, Yeats was in Aberdeen, where he received a telegram from Lady Gregory, saying, “Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift.”
⁹
Disturbances continued through the week: on Tuesday, 29 January, the police were called in, a act that was guaranteed to inflame Sinn Féin, and on Monday, 4 February, there was a public debate during which Synge had few to defend him. He himself did not appear. He was ill, and it is hardly any wonder, given that his health was unsure anyway, and now he was suffering the added strain of seeing the woman he loved, Molly Allgood, subjected to public odium for playing the part of (what seemed to many) something not too remote from a whore.

The gap between reality and what the human mind, in its efforts to console itself, makes of it—in particular, the reality of relations between men and women—is what drives the inquiry that is
The Playboy,
and became the subject of Synge's last, unfinished, play,
Deirdre of the Sorrows
(1910). But Synge was dead before the Abbey produced it.