Playboy of the Western World

In conjunction with the semester-long celebration of Irish drama by the Princeton department of Creative Arts, the Theater and Dance department mounted a production of John Millington Synge's play, Playboy of the Western World, which I saw on Friday night. It's been a long time since I've seen a student production in academia, and it brought back memories, some good, some not so good.

This play, first produced in 1907 at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, presents problems for both an American cast and audience, and that is the language. The dialogue makes heavy use of vernacular, and accordingly, accurate accents must be used. All of this at times can make it sound as if a foreign language is being spoken by the actors. This is further intensified when an actor can not articulate what they are saying properly, or unable to project to the back of the theater. Some of the students in this production did well, others did not. It helps to have read the play beforehand.

The story concerns the arrival of a stranger, one Christy Mahon, to a public house on the coast of County Mayo. He has a wild story to tell--he has killed his father. Instead of marching him off to the police, the locals treat him like a hero. Pegeen Mike, who is the daughter of the owner and basically runs the place, falls in love with him, and is ready to push aside her wishy-washy fiance and marry this knight errant. A neighbor widow also has her eyes on him, and he ends up winning an athletic contest, and is proclaimed "Playboy of the Western World" (the Western world referring to the West coast of Ireland, which was quite a wild and woolly place). It is only when Christy's father shows up, quite alive, that things start to go wrong for Christy.

At the play's opening, the crowd rioted. There are two reasons given for this. The simplest one is that a line of dialogue referred to women's undergarments, a huge no-no in 1907 (Ireland, for all its charms, is very slow in the sexual revolution department). The more complicated reason is that the Irish audience didn't particularly care to see the peasantry depicted as such slippery moral characters. The play survived the tumult, and is now recognized as a classic of modern drama.

With all this Irishness going on, I've also set up my Netflix queue to get a taste of Erin. I started with The Quiet Man and Man of Aran, two seemingly quite different but in some ways similar looks at the Emerald Isle. The Quiet Man was director John Ford's affectionate portrayal of his homeland. Ford, who became famous directing Westerns, always wanted to make this tale, based on a short story, and owned the rights for years before he could finally get financing. It tells the story of an American, Sean Thornton, played by John Wayne, who was born in Ireland and left as a young boy. He comes back and buys the cottage he was born in, and sets about wooing his head-strong and beautiful neighbor, played by Maureen O'Hara. The most famous scene has him kissing O'Hara as the wind blows open the door of the cottage.

The Quiet Man hits on all the romantic, touristy notions of Ireland--the beautiful green countryside, the quaint customs (the film really is about a clash of customs--American vs. Irish, in such matters as asking a woman's hand in marriage and then in collecting a dowry), and the twinkly countryfolk, best exemplified by Barry Fitzgerald, the tippling marriage broker with the leprechaun accent.

Man of Aran is a quasi-documentary by Robert Flaherty, the first great documentarian. He spent two years living with the inhabitants of one of the Aran Islands, rocky isles off the West coast of Ireland. These people lived a particularly harsh existence, as the islands have very little soil for growing crops (they are shown making their own soil, by hauling seaweed up from the beach to use as fertilizer). Fishing is their primary industry, and the sea their great provider and nemesis, as when fishermen went out in their rickety canvas-lined boats, chances were they would never come back again. (Synge wrote beautifully about this in a play called Riders to the Sea).

The film has its detractors--though Flaherty used locals as his actors, all the scenes were staged, including a shark hunt, which the Aran islanders had stopped doing fifty years before. There is no mention of the Catholic church, which was a huge part of their lives, or of the landlord system. Flaherty was simply interested in the man vs. nature aspect, which also was the theme of his other documentaries, particulary Nanook of the North.

Both films, then, are the same in that they emphasize the romantic notion of Ireland, the one tourists want to see when they get off the motor coach. Whether it's colorful people who sound like Barry Fitzgerald, or rugged men in their Aran sweaters, Ireland has a reputation to live up to that is in reality far more complicated, as I'm sure John Millington Synge could tell you.