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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I'm thinking of my luck today, for she will wed me surely, and I a proven hero in the end of all.", March 20, 2009
When this play was produced for the first time in 1907 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the Irish Independent noted that "a mob of howling devils" rioted at the end of Act I because Synge had used the word "shift," meaning "petticoat." The rioting continued on successive nights for a week, because the focus of the action is Christy Mahon, a fugitive, who ironically gains the adulation of a small village because he claims to have killed his father. Every newspaper in Dublin abhorred the play and the Dublin Evening Mail was appalled at its "libeling" of "the saintly Irish peasant." (Quotations from newspapers of the day are widely available and are a fascinating commentary on the period.) Today, a hundred years later, the play is not dated, feeling completely fresh and completely modern. Our on-going fascination with misdeeds and miscreants appears to be so universal that this wryly satiric play is now regarded as Synge's comic masterpiece.
The plot is well known by now. Christy Mahon arrives at a small country inn in a panic, believing that the peelers are tracking him for the murder of his father. The locals at the inn's bar, instead of being horrified by his actions, admire his courage in taking on his father, and give the meek and timid Christy a feeling of accomplishment that he has never had at home. Pegeen Mike, daughter of the owner, hires him to work at the inn, where he becomes the focus of the town's women, both young and old, as he tells, again and again, the story of his (increasingly brave) fight with his slave-driving father. Christy, however, has eyes only for Pegeen.
The contrast between Christy and Shawn Keogh, the devout man to whom Pegeen is pledged, is hilarious, with Christy depicted as attractive and intriguing, while the traditional and saintly Shawn is shown to be boring and stuffy. Admiring Christy's "poetic" and passionate nature, Pegeen is soon in love with him. The sudden appearance of Christy's father in the village leads to the play's turning point, as the populace, embarrassed by their fawning adulation, turns against Christy.
Lively, satiric, and supremely ironic, the play is broadly farcical, and no modern audience would see it as disrespectful of any particular populace--these characters are typical of humankind with its voyeuristic fascination with criminals and criminality, and the plot line and the general themes are universal. Synge's razor sharp dialogue and his use of local dialect certainly give a sense of "Irishness" to the play, which creates local color and charm by putting the author's ideas into a specific context. The conflicts between the generations, between father and son, between the morality of the church and the immorality of real life, between passion and reason, and ultimately between love and hate make this play a rich dramatic experience, one which some might consider equal to the classic comedies of Aristophanes. n Mary Whipple
Riders to the Sea
The Shadow of the Glen (Dodo Press)
The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays: Riders to the Sea; The Shadow of the Glen; The Tinker's Wedding; The Well of the Saints; The Playboy ... of the Sorrows (Oxford World's Classics)
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sounds Like Shakespeare, June 24, 2007
At one point in Ulysses, during a discussion of Shakespeare, Malachi Mulligan asks if Shakespeare isn't the fellow who sounds like John Millington Synge. That's a jab, but a friendly one. I don't think it's intended to be far off from the truth either.
I agree that reading these plays aloud is wonderful.
In a class I took, we read extended portions of "Playboy of the Western World". The class was busting, tearing up with laughter. The play is fall-over funny even if you're reading to yourself.
I just have to say though, that the plays are for performing.
A friend of mine and I did a scene as an acting exercise for a class she was taking--it was one of the scenes in which Christy courts Pegeen Mike--from "Playboy of the Western World". The audience--about 15 people--were spellbound. We looked out at dropped jaws.
This friend of mine and I did a competent job of acting. What blew the class away, really, was the ecstatic language and the infatuation one feels for the characters, their solidity, and the dramatic electricity between them... Lines from this bit come back to me, what? 20 years later? It's like music! The action goes from high tragedy to knockabout.
Well, it's what makes the Irish the Irish.
And the play's been just as good when others did it.
"Riders to the Sea" is like a religious ceremony, similar to the way that the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles are. They use choruses to much the same effect. The action is ritualized and repetitive. Idealized characters utter formula phrases. "Riders" sounds out some elemental terrain: it packs a deep sort of wallop. I'd love to see this performed.
Marvelous English theater!
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THIS JANUARY 2009 REISSUE IS WORD FOR WORD THE SAME AS THE 1998 EDITION, WHICH COPIED THE 1995, ONLY THE COVER ART CHANGES, February 23, 2009
This review is from: The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays: Riders to the Sea; The Shadow of the Glen; The Tinker's Wedding; The Well of the Saints; The Playboy ... of the Sorrows (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)
You really lose nothing in going for a used copy of the eleven year old edition, as it is exactly page for page, word for word the same all the way through, and with the same high quality one expects from the Oxford World Classics series.
Only the cover design is altered, but with the same painting in detail from Sean Keating's Dun Aengus. Most lamentably and most cruelly and most incomprehensibly, this series remains entitled not only Oxford World's Classics, but also Oxford ENGLISH Drama.
This is not English Drama, but Irish National Art, written for the Irish National Theatre directed by Mr. WB Yeats himself, with Lady Gregory in the Irish Renaissance of one hundred years ago. Upon these plays the Abbey Theatre thrived, and everyone involved, and all of the audience, all arise as one body to protest this misnomer.
This is not English Drama; 'tis Irish through and through.
This slander is like including Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney in an anthology of British Poetry.
But let that not dissuade you from this book, this National treasure, ably edited by Ann Saddlemyer in 1995. Her learned fourteen page introduction is comprehensive without being wearisome, and provides fully the background of these great plays. The note on the text indicates the plays are drawn from Ms. Saddlemyer's 1968 Oxford University Press edition, which she crafted from a close examination of every available draft and worksheet.
In the present edition (originally of 1995) she adds Explanatory Notes based most notably on Nicholas Grene's study of an Abbey Theatre promptbook and typescript presented in his 1982 CUA edition of the Synge play Well of the Saints, as well as other sources.
We have here therefore perhaps the most authoritative text now available of Mr. Synge's plays: Riders of the Sea, Shadow of the Glen, The Tinker's Wedding, The Well of the Saints, The Playboy of the Western World and Deifre of the Sorrows. Ms. Saddlemyer includes in her introduction ample background material for understanding the provenance of these powerful plays, and her generous explanatory notes well describe the main cultural aspects their lines imply.
Every student of Mr. Synge does very well to study this book. Every child of Ireland does very well to study Synge. Each human being hears herein their own heart.
Read this book well, alone, out loud, with friends, in any way you can, but read this book.
Saddlemyer, by the way, is the one who rented Synge's cottage to Poet Laureate Seamus Heaney while his family fled to exile from Belfast to Wicklow, in this cottage where Heaney crafted some of his greatest poetry.
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