The Playboy of the Western World

In brief

Christy Mahon, a frightened farm boy, stumbles into a shebeen on the Mayo coast and admits that he has killed his father with a spade. He expects the police. Instead he gets a job, a girl and a reputation. Pegeen Mike throws over her cousin for him, the village girls bring eggs, and by the next day he has told the story so often and so well that he half believes it and wins all the races on the strand. Then the father walks in with his head in bandages.

It is a comedy, subtitled as one, and also the cruellest thing in the Irish theatre. Its first week set off a famous disturbance in Dublin. Its language is either the most beautiful English written for the stage in its century or a fine and fraudulent invention, and a good reader holds both ideas in mind.

The argument

The play’s claim is that a story can make a man. Christy begins as a boy his father bullied and despised, and he becomes, by telling, what his listeners want. They do not want a murderer. They want a tale of murder, far enough away to be enjoyed, told by someone who has dared what they have not. When he then actually strikes the old man down outside the door, the village turns on him in a minute. Pegeen, who loved him, gives the whole theory in a line: “there’s a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed” (Act 3).

That line is the argument about art as well. Synge is writing about an audience’s appetite for violence on the condition that it stay in the mouth, and it is hard not to hear in it the fate of his own play. But the twist is that the lie has worked. Christy has been made by it. When his father rises again, “Are you coming to be killed a third time”, the son gives the orders, and the two of them leave with their positions reversed. His last speech is a boy’s triumph: “you’ve turned me a likely gaffer in the end of all, the way I’ll go romancing through a romping lifetime”. The village keeps its safety and loses the only exciting thing that ever happened to it. Pegeen is left with what she has done: “Oh my grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve lost the only Playboy of the Western World.”

The shape of the play

Three acts, one room, one evening and the following day. Act 1 builds the hero out of nothing: a boy under questioning, then “I just riz the loy and let fall the edge of it on the ridge of his skull”, then a publican who hires him as pot-boy because the police will now keep away. It ends with him dropping to sleep, delighted, with “two fine women fighting for the likes of me”.

Act 2 shows the story growing with each retelling, and the girls answering it: “That’s a grand story.” Old Mahon then arrives with his head in bandages, showing them, says the stage direction, “with some pride”. Act 3 is the structural marvel. The great love scene and Michael James’s drunken blessing of the match come first, the hero at his height. Then the father, the second blow, the rope, and Pegeen with a lighted sod, burning Christy’s leg to make him let go. The comedy never stops, which is the horror of it.

The voice

Synge’s preface makes his case with some aggression. He claims he has used one or two words only that he has not heard from country people, and he attacks both schools of the moment: Mallarmé and Huysmans for richness without life, “Ibsen and Zola dealing with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words”. His own programme is simple: “On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy”, and “every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple”.

The result is a language that exists nowhere and sounds as if it must. Irish syntax lies under it, in the “after” perfect and the clauses hung on “and”, with biblical cadence and a trick of ending on an unexpected image. Here is Christy on what his love would make God feel, in the speech every reader remembers: “I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I’d feel a kind of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in his golden chair.” Such lines are beautiful, and they are also a boast, made by a boy who was afraid of the police a day before. Synge knows this. The comedy of the play is that nobody in it can distinguish eloquence from truth, and that eloquence does in the end make the truth.

The Abbey riots

The play opened at the Abbey Theatre on Saturday 26 January 1907, with W. G. Fay as Christy, Molly Allgood, Synge’s fiancée, acting as Máire O’Neill, as Pegeen and her sister Sara Allgood as the Widow Quin. Yeats was lecturing in Scotland. The first two acts went well enough, and Lady Gregory’s first telegram to him reported success. The second, as Yeats recalled it in his essay on Synge, read: “Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift.”

The word comes in Act 3, when Christy tells the Widow Quin that he wants only Pegeen, “and what’d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the Eastern World?” The shift was a woman’s undergarment. To say so in public, about Irish women, was to some nationalists unbearable, and it was only the fuse. A Catholic middle class had spent a generation building an image of the Irish peasant as chaste and sober against the English stage Irishman, and here was an Ascendancy Protestant’s play in which that peasant worships a parricide and his women are eager. The Freeman’s Journal called it “an unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant men, and worse still upon Irish girlhood”. Arthur Griffith called it “a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform”.

Through the following week, audiences shouted, sang and blew trumpets so that some performances were played in dumb show. Police were brought in and arrests made. Yeats came back from Scotland, defended the theatre from the stage, and held to the run; he also announced a public debate for the next Monday, in which he faced the hostile crowd. “Riot” is a generous word. Most of it was shouting in the stalls and a few scuffles, as the Irish Times has pointed out, but the name has stuck, and so has the principle Yeats stood for: a national theatre does not let its audience choose its plays. On the 1911–12 American tour the row was repeated: hecklers in New York threw vegetables and stink bombs, and in Philadelphia the cast were arrested for staging an immoral play, the charges later being dismissed. When Dublin protested at Seán O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in 1926, Yeats went out and told them they had disgraced themselves again.

The people

Christy Mahon

Christy is a shy, abused young man who discovers language as other boys discover drink. He is at his most convincing, and most frightening, when he has stopped acting, in the last minutes of the play.

Pegeen Mike

Pegeen is the best part in the play, and Synge wrote it for the woman he loved. She is hard and funny, runs the bar, and despises the cousin she must marry. Christy offers her what the bishops’ dispensation does not. Her ferocity at the end comes from having been made a fool of in the only hope she had, and the final cry tells us she knows what she has burnt.

Old Mahon and the Widow Quin

Old Mahon is a squatter and a drunk, and a splendid comic monster who is proud of his wounds and cannot be killed. The Widow Quin, a woman of about thirty who hit her husband with “a worn pick” and killed him, sees through Christy the moment she sets eyes on him and helps him anyway. They are the two people who know what the world is, and the play likes them for it.

Shawn Keogh and Michael James

Shawn is the Church’s obedient boy, in terror of “Father Reilly”, and he leaves his coat in the hands of the men rather than stay with Pegeen unchaperoned. Michael James, the publican, is the voice of the community on a good day, blessing the match with “A daring fellow is the jewel of the world”.

How it was made

The germ is in Synge’s The Aran Islands (1907). An old man on Aran told him of a Connaught man who killed his father with a spade and was hidden by the islanders from the police. Synge’s comment there goes to the root of the play: the impulse to protect a criminal is universal in the west, partly from hatred of the English law and partly because these people, “never criminals yet always capable of crime”, regard a crime as something like a storm at sea. He had been going to the islands since 1898, listening, keeping notebooks, and he worked up the play through many drafts while his health failed. He died of Hodgkin’s disease in March 1909, aged thirty-seven, with Deirdre of the Sorrows unfinished, two years after the play that made him notorious.

He was a Protestant, a Trinity man, and the son of a landed family, and that matters. He brought to Mayo an outsider’s love and an outsider’s risk: the people he praised were the people the audience thought it was defending.

Joyce and Synge

James Joyce and Synge met in Paris in March 1903, when Synge showed him the manuscript of Riders to the Sea. Joyce, twenty-one and armed with Aristotle, told him it was a dwarf drama and no true tragedy. He seems to have kept the text in his head, because in 1908 he translated it into Italian with Nicolò Vidacovich, and in Zurich in 1918, for the English Players, he had Nora play a principal role in it while he sang offstage.

The Playboy became part of Joyce’s private history of Dublin’s failures. In “Gas from a Burner” (1912), his broadside after the printing of Dubliners was destroyed, the publisher’s voice boasts of having printed “the great John Milicent Synge” in “the playboy shift that he pinched as swag”, which brings the telegram’s scandalous word into Joyce’s own satire on Irish prudery. In the library scene of Ulysses Buck Mulligan warns Stephen that “The tramper Synge is looking for you, he said, to murder you”, and adds that Synge “has left off wearing black to be like nature”.

Joyce and Synge were opposite answers to one problem: an Irish language in English, one made from the west’s speech and the other from Dublin’s. Joyce wrote “The Dead”, with its Aran invitation and its turn westward, in 1907, the year of the riots.

Afterlives

Mustapha Matura moved it to Trinidad as Playboy of the West Indies (1984). Pan Pan set it in a Beijing hair salon in 2006, in Mandarin, and a member of the audience complained about a skirt, which Synge would have appreciated. In 2007 the Abbey itself staged Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s version, in which Christy is a Nigerian refugee in west Dublin who says he killed his father with a pestle. Druid’s staging of all six Synge plays in 2005 is the modern landmark for the original, and a National Theatre production opened in London in December 2025, with Nicola Coughlan in the cast.

Vivian Mercier was among the first to trace a line from Synge’s tramps and eloquent wretches to Beckett, who went to the Abbey as a young man and admired him. That may be the lasting inheritance: grandeur of speech in the mouths of people who have nothing.

How to read it

Read it aloud. The rhythm carries what the page can look too quaint to hold, and the jokes come through only in the mouth.
Read the preface last. Its claims are a provocation, and clearer once you have heard the play.
Keep the comedy and the cruelty together. The scorched leg is a stage direction in a comedy; try not to soften it.
Know the free text. All of it is out of copyright. Project Gutenberg’s edition is complete, with Synge’s preface, and Standard Ebooks has a careful one too.