Reviews for The Playboy of the Western World

The average rating for The Playboy of the Western World based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-11-16 00:00:00 Christopher Copeland 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. The premise of this once controversial play is a simple one. 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. 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. How Christy's tale affects his life'and the lives of those around him'is the essence of Synge's play. It is difficult now, one hundred and nine years later, to see what all the fuss was about. 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. Indeed it is a marvelous play, memorable principally for two things: the surprising sadness of its ending, and the poetic glories of its speech. One of my favorite quotes about the Irish comes from G.K. Chesterton's "The Ballad of the White Horse": The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad. 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. And the last despairing cry of Pegeen Mike changes utterly'although it does not diminish'the laughter of Synge's play. 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. Here, in the first act, Christy speaks to Pegeen Mike of the loneliness of a vagabond on the road: CHRISTY--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? PEGEEN. What call have you to be that lonesome when there's poor girls walking Mayo in their thousands now? CHRISTY -- [grimly.] It's well you know what call I have. It's well you know it's a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights shining sideways when the night is down, or going in strange places with a dog nosing before you and a dog nosing behind, or drawn to the cities where you'd hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty, hungry stomach failing from your heart. There even more beautiful, more romantic speeches later in the play. But you will have to read or see the play yourself to find them.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-12-28 00:00:00 Sandra Small Synge's The Playboy of the Western World must be an Irish classic. Set in County Mayo during the early 1900s, Synge tells the story of Christy Mahon, traveler escaping psuedo-mysterious past and claiming he killed his father, his Da. I think that in the context of the Irish culture exploration, this is a fundamental element. His hosts become instant admirers for his romanticism, or at least their idea of his romanticism and I think it is here that Synge delivers his message, the longing, lost nature of the Irish spirit.