Home Performances Cast Tickets ... Sponsors The Playboy of the Western World sparked riots when it opened in Dublin, Ireland, in 1907. During the nationalistic fervor of the times, the play's unflinching, unromaticized portrayal of the Irish peasantry was considered something just short of treason. John Millington Synge was from the Anglo-Irish class and had spent months on the Aran Isles off the western coast of Ireland. He lived with fishermen and farmers, collecting stories and songs, and learning Gaelic. To this day, the debate as to whether or not The Playboy of the Western World depicts Irish rural life authentically rages on long after Pegeen, Christy and the others have joined Cúchulainn and King Arthur in Tír Na Nóg.
JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE (1871 - 1909) playwright; Born 16th Apr 1871, Newtown Little, Rathfarnham, County Dublin
Educated privately and at Trinity College Dublin, where he won prizes in Irish and Hebrew. As a boy he showed an absorbing interest in nature and roamed the Dublin mountains and Wicklow glens. He studied at the Royal Irish Academy of Music while still an undergraduate and became proficient on the piano, flute, and violin. Deciding to become a musician, he went to Germany in 1893 for further study but after two years turned to literature and settled in Paris, making occasional trips to Ireland, including a visit to the Aran Islands.
In Paris he met W B Yeats, who advised him to return to the Aran Islands and write about the way of life there. Synge spent the late summers of 18991902 on the islands, sharing the isolated life, playing his fiddle, and listening to the talk and stories around the firesides at night. He began a book, The Aran Islands, which found a publisher in 1907 and was illustrated by Jack Yeats. | |
|
