The Playboy of the Western World – John Millington Synge

First performance: November 12, 2008

Last performance: March 29, 2009

The play was written 100 years ago, in 1907, and could have been created by any of the great playwrights of the past two centuries. In the village of Mayo, in the outskirts of the Western world, on the steep slopes of Catholic Ireland, nothing changes, and everyone lives at their own pace, disconnected from the rest of civilisation and society. That is until a stranger, a young man, appears at Mike’s tavern with his daughter Peggy, quickly becoming the village hero and an object of desire for women, who lavish him with their attention, care, and adoration. Everything changes very quickly because in Synge’s theatre, shifts and upheavals happen instantaneously. John Millington Synge lived only 38 years (1871-1909) and wrote The Playboy of the Western World two years before his death. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, where Samuel Beckett, who would later come to regard him as his mentor in dramatic writing, would also study. After completing his studies, he met the future Nobel laureate Irish poet Yeats in Paris. At Yeats’ urging, Synge returned to live among Irish farmers and engage with the life of the Irish countryside. The friendship and collaboration between the two Irish intellectuals would radically change the course of Irish theatre and literature. The Playboy, which is one of Synge’s last works and widely regarded as his masterpiece, achieved tremendous success wherever it was performed and continues to be appreciated thanks to its vibrant, fresh language, unique and absurd humour, and the particular precision and detail in the description of its characters.

Source: theatreworld.wordpress.com