The Western World in Association with the Belfast International Arts Festival by J.M.Synge Directed by Oonagh Murphy
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THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE BELFAST INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL BY J.M.SYNGE DIRECTED BY OONAGH MURPHY MAIN STAGE 19 NOV 2019 - 4 JAN 2020 WELCOME TO THE LYRIC THEATRE DRIVING HOME FOR CHRISTMAS BY GRIMES & McKEE Welcome to our co-production with the Dublin Theatre massive interest in the folkloric narratives because Festival of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. they contained the mythic and archetypal views of our past. Those who say Synge transcribed the voice of the In these strange times of opportunistic politics, we have Aran islands onto his manuscript diminish the genius come to rely on a sort of hero to see us out of what looks of extraordinary writing. Writing is not documentary, like a messy labyrinth. A sort of hero with a story. When it is not about being true to an idea of a people, it is we look to great theatre, we can claim that the English about, and only about, itself. Synge found liberation have Hamlet as a sort of hero even though he is Danish, in the voices of the west and his brilliance dances and the Irish have Christy Mahon, a sort of hero and also across the stages that bring life to his world. Like from somewhere northern. Hamlet is weighted down by Shakespeare, Synge is capable of taking any intriguing indecision and guilt. Christy flies in the face of a story concept so long as the quality of this provocation that inspires desire and dread. Both protagonists must is a response based on love and respect. There is confront the ghosts of their fathers to find their true worth. no point in dressing a well-loved classic in modern 29 NOV 2019 - 4 JAN 2020 Hamlet eventually makes a decision that collapses the clothes unless you have those qualities in abundance. existing state around his dying body. Christy confronts Likewise, there is no point re-dressing it in peat and his worst fear but finds his true voice and spirit. Both tweed unless you can liberate it from the trappings of heroes lose their lovers in the course of their quest. The a museum piece. I feel Oonagh and her brilliant team difference is that Ophelia is driven mad and to her grave of actors are allowing us to hear the play fresh again. by Hamlet’s provocations; and Pegeen, who is more forthright than Ophelia, more vibrant, more independent In 1907, many theatregoers exclaimed The Playboy was a - but also, like Christy (like Hamlet), with father issues - thundering disgrace and should never have been staged PETER is driven to violence and action by what she feels was a at the national theatre. They were like the later folk lie. The story she believed was in fact untrue. She seeks traditionalists who tried to bring an axe to the cable that to destroy this problem but could be destroying herself. allowed Bob Dylan to go electric. In a way, it was Synge One reading of the play is that Pegeen is more proactive who was Dylan in this by going electric on the Irish blues. than the Playboy, confronting all manner of furies flying at her from the three village girl sirens to the most It’s easy to forget that The Playboy of the Western World dangerous enchantress of them all, the Widow Quin. was one of the great acts of the Irish Revolution. Not just because it scared the “bejaysus” out of those most The Playboy of the Western World, like Hamlet, is committed nationalists who saw the peasants as a noble one of world theatre’s undying classics. It contains race blighted by English control. The forces of the crown in its story multitudes that every society has found remain on the fringes of this story. These folk are not PAN an echo of itself in. There have been versions set in a community planning revolution against an outsider THE MUSICAL the Caribbean, the Soviet Union, India and inner-city oppressor, but instead beginning to tear at the bounds Dublin with a Nigerian immigrant as Christy. Synge they have put on themselves. The story is the thing. It ADAPTED FROM THE PLAY BY JM BARRIE has influenced all of the great writers in the theatre can make you a hero or bring retribution on your head. of the past hundred years - Bertolt Brecht, Sam BOOK, MUSIC & LYRICS BY PAUL BOYD Beckett, Lorca, Caryl Churchill, Marina Carr, etc. I hope you enjoy our production of it. He was always the outsider. A friend with W.B. Yeats, Thank you for coming along. Synge’s first love was French literature - he was a graduate of the Sorbonne. It was Yeats who recommended Jimmy Fay he take himself to the west of Ireland and discover his Executive Producer voice. In the late 19th and early 20th century, there was Lyric Theatre BY ARRANGEMENT WITH GREAT ORMOND STREET HOSPITAL CHILDREN’S CHARITY AND SAMUEL FRENCH LTD. A CONCORD THEATRICALS COMPANY. 3 LYRICTHEATRE DIRECTOR’S NOTE FROM THE REHEARSAL ROOM And so you’ll hear that we’ve situated our shebeen, a little further north than Mayo, it's a failing pub in a small town at the edge of somewhere, on the border of one place and another. We’ve talked about places like Ballyshannon, and other town in Donegal, previously prosperous towns, cut off after partition, and facing huge fears about further marginalisation through a Brexit-imposed hard border. In transposing it to here, it brings into sharp focus how the play is an exploration of the loneliness and disenfranchisement that comes from living in a place that lies far away from where the power lies. We meet young people growing up in the middle of nowhere with no real possibility of leaving, older people with little to no means of supporting themselves, numbing their lostness with alcohol. The spectre of addiction and suicide, throws a shadow across the reality of these characters’ psychological terrain. How do you take on Playboy? An urtext of the Irish theatrical canon, and arguably, a foundational myth of the In 2019 we live in an alternate reality to the world about Irish Free State; a play, it seems with countless seminal which Synge was writing. And yet in many ways we’re productions in its past, is it even possible to approach the still dealing with the same power structures, ones that play afresh? could be seen as foundational to Irish society. It’s in that light that we see Pegeen’s plight, a young woman, There are the many interpretations of the Playboy, of what taking on the work of her alcoholic father, and yet still sort of allegory it is, and what it seeks to say, beyond its somehow feeling the limits of her personal freedoms comedy. If we are to take the playwright at his own word, in a world structured to view her as something to be when writing in the Irish Times after its premiere, Synge bartered between two men. remarked: ‘a great deal more that is behind it, is perfectly serious, when looked at in a certain light’. He observes Our production takes the pulse of the young women of that Patrick D. Kenny’s review of the play had noted that the town, their hopes and ambitions, their amusements ‘there were several sides of “The Playboy”’ and Synge and their desires. In pushing them centre-stage, suggests cryptically that ‘there may be still be others, if the aim is to foreground, perhaps what it was that anyone cares to look for them’. upset the audiences at the Abbey in 1904, who cried ‘Shame’ from the auditorium. Back then, the mere Declan Kiberd famously examined the play in the light mention of the underwear of the female characters, of the hero Cuchulain, and the Ulster Cycle. Turning the and their representation ‘contending in their lusts for heroism of Cuchulain on his head, Synge uses the mock- the possession’ of Christy Mahon upset the piety of the hero Christy in an iconoclastic sense, warning against the middle class cultural nationalists. This respectability exaltation of graven images at a moment in Irish society politics, and fear of women having real agency in when ancient myth was being used to stoke the fervour their lives, set the tone for the decades after the of nationalist sentiment. This idea has propelled our work establishment of the Irish Free State, a systematic on the play, in one sense a caution about the manipulation project by government to limit the citizenship rights of of images around masculinity, violence, and martyrdom. Irish women between 1922 and 1937. By ’37, women’s rights were bound in a tight knot constitutionally, which And what does it mean to do this play right now? The we have been unpicking ever since. play was written in 1904, when Ireland was still under British rule. So my thoughts have been on what this text All of this pours light on our revival of Synge’s work, will mean to a contemporary audience in Belfast and and poses the question – might anything be considered in Dublin, as we live through this current moment in so incendiary to Irish society ever again? There may Anglo-Irish relations, and explore what it means for a no longer be a strong policing of certain themes from contemporary audience in both Belfast and Dublin. a moral perspective in our societies mainstream, but artists are far from unshackled from the threat of During the process of auditioning, I was struck by how censorship.