Cathy Belton as Pegeen Mike and Tom Vaughan Lawlor as Christy Mahon in the Abbey Theatre's production of "The Playboy of the Western World" by J.M. Synge. Photo: Tom Lawlor

In 1911, the city of Philadelphia welcomed the Abbey Theatre cast members of J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World by summarily arresting them. Nearly a century later, in October 2004, the Abbey Theatre's performance of the same play at Upenn's Zellerbach Theatre proved once again arresting.

The Playboy of the Western World is perhaps John M. Synge's most famous work. Part of this fame is based in notoriety: namely, the riots it sparked when it was first performed in Dublin. Here was a theatrical piece written by an Irishman about his own people, performed in a theatre that was specifically founded to celebrate an art, language and culture that had long been suppressed. So what, exactly, was the problem?

Michael Barsanti, Associate Director and resident Joycean and Irish history scholar of Philadelphia's Rosenbach Museum, cites two major reasons for the controversy, both at home and abroad: the way the play depicted the Irish rural stereotype, and the way it portrayed women. Of particular note, it was the mention of the word "shifts" or women's undergarments, that set an audience already teetering on outrage over the edge.

Controversy was the furthest thing from Synge's mind when he wrote The Playboy of the Western World, set in a fictional town in the isolated Aran Islands. Barsanti describes the play as a "dark comedy." A stranger, Christy Mahon, who is running from the law because he has killed his father stumbles into the pub and the lives of one small village in a rural town of Ireland's West.

In the primary ironic twist of the story, Christy's dramatic tales of how he accomplished this deed win him the admiration, rather than the disapproval, of every villager he meets. The female protagonist, Pegeen, whose father owns the pub, foreshadows this lionization of Mahon when she notes the peculiar violence and insanity of her people.

Olwen Fouere as The Widon Quinn. Photo: Tom Lawlor

The centerpiece in this odd ring of villagers is the Widow Quin who is rumoured to have caused the eventual death of her own husband. A brazen, bawdy, independent woman, she literally wears the pants in her household in the Abbey's interpretation of the play, and is a constant foil to Christy Mahon. What's more, in the turn- of the century social climate of rural Ireland, both the Widow Quin and Pegeen, who refuses to marry the man her father has chosen for her, are seen as dangerous and threatening to Irish values imposed upon women by family and church.

"This is a play that plays upon and plays with some of the gender stereotypes," Michael Barsanti remarks. "Gender roles for women were much more constrained than they were in our world, in the United States."

The very fact that The Playboy juxtaposes female characters who dare to think for themselves against male characters, such as Christy Mahon, who allow themselves to be shaped solely upon how others perceive them, proved unsettling for Irish audiences. Compound this with Synge's farcical, rather than ennobling, portrayal of the Irish peasant, and it becomes clear why The Playboy offended so many. Barsanti suggests that it presents "a joke that plays upon stereotypes that the audience thought were unflattering to the Irish." In fact, it must have seemed antithetical to the Abbey Theatre's mission, which was to reconcile the two separate realms of politics and art. In creating and re-claiming a uniquely Irish genre of theatre, the Abbey's founders reasoned, the Irish could forge cultural and political sovereignty.

History has proven forgiving for Synge's masterpiece, especially in light of its icy reception when it was first performed. The relevance of a work is measured in great part by what it says about people living today as well as when it was created. The Philadelphia performance breathed vigorous life into a century-old work whose language on the written page might otherwise seem antiquated. In his spoken introduction before the opening act, Michael Rose, managing director for Penn's Annenberg Center, called this particular performance an "iconoclastic approach." He did not elaborate, leaving it up to the audience to decide just how.

	The Abbey on Tour. L to R: Brendan Conroy as Philly O'Cullen, Maeliosa Stafford as Old Mahon and David Herhily as Jimmy Farrell. Photo: Tom Lawlor

While the performance preserved the integrity of the original text, it also took the liberty of expanding the role of a minor character, the Bellman, to that of narrator. The Bellman is a town crier of sorts, and in this performance he becomes the voice of the playwright. Ringing a set of hand cymbals, he offsets his shabby dress with a noble recitation of elegant prose penned by Synge in his introduction to Playboy. Perhaps nothing sums up Synge's intentions for this piece so well as the Bellman declaiming, "On the stage, one must have reality and one must have joy." Like Celtic knotwork, he is twined seamlessly into the play via the page from which he reads. The page in turn becomes a vehicle for Pegeen's letter, as the Bellman hands it to her in the opening scene.

Similarly, the cymbal crashes which punctuate the opening of every scene also the close the final scene. Pegeen, alone onstage, isolated in a single spotlight representing the knowledge that her actions have driven away Christy, the only man she loves, laments brokenly, "O, my grief, I've lost him surely. I've lost the only Playboy of the Western World," to the sound of cymbals that sound but are not permitted to ring out.

A parallel can be drawn between Christy's admiration of himself in the mirror in the second act, as if seeing himself for the first time, and the evolution of the theatre-goer's acceptance for Playboy of the Western World. What Synge didn't know when he wrote the play was that it would mirror the expereiences of its hero, who had to travel away from his own people in order to be accepted. Michael Barsanti points out that this was a plight many of Synge's contemporaries faced. They believed that "the Irish people would destroy the prophets who spoke in their own country."

For this performance of The Playboy of the Western World, it was not only the distance of place, but time, that lent the valuable perspective of humor. During intermission, one of the ushers was heard to remark that, standing in front of the theatre's doors, all she could hear was the audience laughter. Whereas in 1911 the audience rioted before the play could even conclude, there was only riotous applause for October's performance at the Zellerbach.

The Abbey Theatre Performed The Playboy of the Western World in repertory at the University of Pennsylvania from October 12 to 16, 2004. To learn about upcoming arts and culture events at U Penn, please visit http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/artsandculture/index.. For further information on the Abbey Theatre, visit www.abbeytheatre.ie .

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