playboy of the western world by jm synge

What call have you to be that lonesome when there's poor girls walking Mayo in their thousands now?ĬHRISTY - It's well you know what call I have. Here, in the first act, Christy speaks to Pegeen Mike of the loneliness of a vagabond on the road:ĬHRISTY-And isn't it a poor thing to be starting again and I a lonesome fellow will be looking out on women and girls the way the needy fallen spirits do be looking on the Lord?

To illustrate the glories of its language-as poetic and natural as the speech of the west coast of Ireland-I will give you one example. And the last despairing cry of Pegeen Mike changes utterly-although it does not diminish-the laughter of Synge’s play. Sure, it is an exaggeration, but it points up one of the great truths about the Irish attitude toward life and literature: sorrow lives amidst our laughter, and, amidst our weeping, joy. Chesterton’s “The Ballad of the White Horse”:Īnd all their songs are sad. One of my favorite quotes about the Irish comes from G.K. Indeed it is a marvelous play, memorable principally for two things: the surprising sadness of its ending, and the poetic glories of its speech. So what if one of the characters referred to the women as “standing in their shifts”? So what if the colleens are so quickly enamoured of a self-proclaimed parricide? Any kind of man-let alone a dangerous and handsome bad boy-must have been hard to find on the lonely emigration-depopulated Mayo coast. It is difficult now, one hundred and nine years later, to see what all the fuss was about. How Christy’s tale affects his life-and the lives of those around him-is the essence of Synge’s play. Since murderers are a novelty, and Christy tells a good story, all the widows and young girls soon fall in love with him, including the pub owner’s spirited daughter Pegeen Mike.

Christy Mahon, a young vagrant, enters an isolated pub on the coast of County Mayo and tells the locals he’s a fugitive, having murdered his own father in the family field with a single stroke of a spade.

The premise of this once controversial play is a simple one. How can I help but love Ireland? For example, how can you not love a nation that values both popular theater and “Irish womanhood” so highly that a new comedy-with “scandalous” depictions of Irish women-can cause a riot? And, no, I don’t mean a “laugh riot.” I mean a real honest-to-Jesus in-the-theatre riot that lasted over a week, featuring toy trumpets, penny whistles, rotten vegetables, stink bombs, and the summoning of the Dublin Metropolitan Police.

Playboy of the western world by jm synge