J. M. Synge's Playboy: A Necessary Reassessment

J. M. SYNGE'S PL4YBOY: A NECESSARY REASSESSMENT IT IS A CURIOUS FACT THAT The Playboy of the Western World., a play which mightily offended its first audiences, still does not-in spite of its, by now, obvious stature and importance-gain easy or ready acceptance from the ordinary reader or theater-goer. Most people, on first becoming acquainted with the play, seem not to like it. Perhaps in the light of this there is room for reassessment. It is a play about which a good deal has already been written, but not all that has been written has served to illuminate the play, more especially from the point of view of the playas a piece of theater-in-performance. There seem to me to be elements in this play that have never been noted at all and even where several of these elements have been noted, they have not been sufficiently related to each other as parts of a unique whole, so the total sense of the play has been missed. Donna Gerstenberger, in her John Millington Synge (New York: Twayne, 1964) seems to ignore the reality-illusion paradox-which in my submission lies at the heart of this play-completely. She seems to see the play wholly in terms of "self-realization" and, while this is certainly one of the elements of the play, it is a diminution to reduce the work simply to these terms. lVIoreover, her efforts to trace an obvious and surface symbolism in such things as the use of and reference to clothing, seem to me strained. L. A. G. Strong in a monograph, John Millington Synge (London: 1941) which is charming and in lnany ways excellent, bedevils the issue at one point by declaring that the construction of Playboy is faulty. (Alan Price disagrees with him: "... there are few comedies so well made....") One object of the present essay is to try to demonstrate that the construction of the play is almost perfect, ends and means being so in accord afld the general spirit of the piece informing so thoroughly all its parts, that structure fuses itself with meaning. Strong's argument seems to me to fail because by "construction" he simply means plot: the totality of the play's expression escapes him and he treats the language, which in this play is not so much a vehicle of meaning as the very essence of the meaning itself, as a delightful excrescence. Alan Price,l in talking 1 Synge and the Anglo-Irish Drama (London: Methuen, 1961). This is, in many ways, an excellent book, though in my view its analysis of Playboy is one-sided and incomplete. Price is concerned to demonstrate that the "dream and actuality" theme permeates all Synge's plays, which he convincingly does. So far as Pla'yboy is concerned, therefore, one may fairly say that Price succeeds more in relating it to the rest of Synge's work than in exploring its own greatness and unity-in-diversity . It is richer and more complex than he represents it as being, and the difference in stature between it and the rest of Synge's work is much greater than Mr. Price's analysis would suggest. III 112 MODERN DRAMA September of "dream and actuality" in the play sees these two things as simple alternatives. The idea of reality and illusion as simultaneously coexistent within all situations and all personalities, is thereby missed and something of the wry an.d bitter richness of the play sacrificed in consequence. The notion of Christy completely transformed as a result of the movement from dream into actuality, is too simplistically romantic. The play has greater depth than this: illusion and reality are both in him in a strange amalgam, even at the end of the play when he triumphantly departs. F. L. Lucas, in The Drama of Chekhov~ Synge, Yates and Pirandello (London: Cassell, 1963) says, "but the play remains extraordinary fun; perhaps even better-unless it is quite superbly acted-to read than to see. For its greatest quality is literaryits eloquence." This misses the point completely and in two ways: first, because it does not recognize the language as the...