The Making of the Playboy

THE MAKING OF THE PLAYBOY YEATS SAID OF The Playboy of the We~ern World that the inability of the original audiences to understand it represented the only serious failure of the Abbey Theatre movement.1 The most recent significant appearance of The Playboy took place off-Broadway in 1958, and its reviewers, though generally kind, revealed, like those of the past, some confusion as to the essential import of the play. Indeed, The Playboy seems a work destined to be forever misinterpreted. At the start of its career in 1907 it caused riots because of its alleged immorality; since then it has produced mainly perplexity. Seeing a realistic production of The Playboy, one is made acutely conscious of the problem which Synge himself raised during the first tumultuous week of the original Dublin performance, when he insisted he'd written "an extravaganza" -only to add later that the source of the play lay in his understanding of Irish psyche and Irish speech as they actually existed, thus claiming for the work an ultimate realism.2 The dilemma of whether The Playboy is essentially realistic or fantastic is the one on which producers and critics have foundered ever since. Viewed as realistic drama, the play immediately begins to seem implausible. That a man should become to strangers a hero by virtue of a tale of patricide, and become in the end genuinely masterful for no readily apparent reason-the psychology of the real world is little help in interpreting these events. On the other hand, if one considers the playas fantasy, it begins to seem strangely random and undeniably hampered by its realistic elements. The Playboy has usually been admired for its quaintness, its poetry, or its comic force, and, though a popular anthology piece and reasonably often revived, has been universally underrated as a coherent work of art.3 I do not plan a full reading of it here, but wish to trace a source of the play's power which has never been insisted upon by critics or producers. One aspect of The Playboy that seems disturbing is the curious tone with which it treats the theme of patricide. To be sure, the second time Christy strikes his father the spectators on stage feel that he should be hanged for his deed. But they are in no way horrified by it: they 1. W. B. Yeats, "On Taking The Playboy to London," Plays and Contr01lersies (London, 1923), p. 197. 2. See, for example, the detailed account of the play's early history in David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, J. M. Synge (New York, 1959), pp. 238-251. 3. Two recent critics have provided notable exceptions to this generalization. In "The Hero as Playboy," University of Kansas City Review, XXI (1954), 9-19, Hugh H. MacLean offers an interPretation of the play in which Christy is a Christian scapegoat who can only save himself, not the world. Closer to my reading is Norman Podhoretz's "Synge's Playboy: Morality and the Hero," Essays in Criticism~ III (1953), 337-44. Mr. Podhoretz sees Christy's "murders" as the symbolic self-assertions or the nltimately anti-social hero. 314 1961 THE MAKING OF THE PLAYBOY 315 believe Christy to be potentially dangerous to them and they fear legal involvement in his crime; sell-preservation motivates them. Nor, for that matter, does the revived father appear to think that there is anything extraordinary about a son who has twice tried to kill him. He resents the attempts in a personal way-as well he mightbut he does not find them unnatural. The emotional weight of The Playboy of the Western World is on patricide as a noble deed, not as an abhorrent one. Oedipus kills his father, and the crime brings a plague on his city. Orestes kills his mother and is pursued by furies. Patricide and matricide were for sophisticated Greeks the most dreadful of sins; Freud has brought modem readers to consciousness of the roots of the horror which the Greeks felt, and which twentieth-century audiences of Greek tragedy continue to feel. Yet Synge somehow manages to treat so dreadful a theme with apparent lightness. For parallels...