The Gallous Story and the Dirty Deed: The Two Playboys

The Gallous Story and the Dirty Deed: The Two Playboys EDWARD HIRSCH The Playboy of the Western World is the most controversial play in Irish history. When The Playboy was first produced in January, 1907, it sparked a turbulent week ofdemonstrations and riots. Even such a devotee of the Dublin theater as Joseph Holloway labeled the play "Blackguardism!" and Synge "the evil genius of the Abbey.'" Yet Synge's "able lieutenant" and most incisive early commentator,.W.B. Yeats, immediately responded to the "mischievous extravagance" and verbal brilliance of the play, and he considered the failure of the audience to understand it the one serious failure of the Irish dramatic movement.2 During the length of its first production the play spawned a diversity of opinions which in effect break down into two violently opposed camps, represented by Yeats on one side and the opening-night Abbey audience on the other. The Yeatsian, or modernist, reading of Synge emphasized how much of the mind of Ireland the play contained, while praising its imaginative extravagance and exuberance, its satiric force, and, perhaps most crucially, its rich linguistic plenitude. The initial audience, responding to what it understood as the representational mode of The Playboy, dismissed the portrayal of Irish life as false naturalism, and objected to the plot and the language of the play on social and political grounds. The audiences who rioted in New York and Philadelphia in 1911-1912 when the Irish actors took the play on tour were heirs to the representational "reading" of Synge. Most of Synge's subsequent literary commentators have followed the Yeatsian tradition of reading. Thus, most literary critics have accepted that The Playboy exists "in the realms of fantasy or phantasmagoria" (Se6n 6 Tuama) and that the play's actions "make no pretence to realism" (Alan J. Bliss).' Clearly, Synge's first reviewers in both the nationalist and the unionist presses thought otherwise. The Sinn Fiin writer categorically announced that "the author of the play presents it as true to Irish life" ("The Abbey Theatre," 2 February 1907, p. 2); similarly the Irish Times's reviewer suggested that "Mr. 86 BOWARD HIRSCH Synge set himself the task of introducing his audience to a realistic picture of peasant life in the far west of Ireland ..." ("Abbey Theatre," 28 January 1907, p. 7). The modernist and representational ways of encountering The Playboy face each other in inevitable conflict. Indeed, sometimes the space between them seems as great as what Pegeen Mike identifies as the "great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed.". One way to respond to this critical gap is simply by dismissing the reactions of the Dublin audience. This has been the fundamental strategy adopted by almost alJ critics. If anything, the controversy over The Playboy has usually been invoked to sustain the myth of Synge as an unwitting victim, an innocent genius howled down by cultural philistines. Alan Price puts forward the conventional opinion when he states that "the fierce assaults upon Synge during his lifetime ... are not, in any sense, literary comment or criticism that merits consideration."s It has been axiomatic for several generations of Synge critics to summarize the controversy by stating that the Dublin (and the later IrishAmerican ) playgoers had narrow political and moral values but no literary or aesthetic values. Yet a playgoer without aesthetic values is a strange creature to contemplate, since no play can elicit response (and certainly not with the vehemence of the Abbey audience on opening night) without some aesthetic conventions for interpreting, understanding, and evaluating it. No doubt there were a vast number ofpeople who objected to the moral, religious, and political content of the play without ever hearing it, or like the minor Abbey playwright William Boyle, without ever attending a performance.6 Yet the very frequency with which the issue of the play's realism was invoked by Synge's opponents should alert us to the literary dimensions of the first audience's responses. Those hostile responses were in part a reaction to the controversial realism of the play, a realism that is simultaneously asserted and denied as the action unfolds. The key question which has seldom been asked...