Playboy of the Western World

Nothing will do, I suppose, but to bring out John Synge's dictum that "in a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple." If even Synge's own words are inadequate to describe the beauty of the County Mayo lyricism which he transcribed and transmuted, there is small possibility of my doing any better. Beauty is beauty. "Go and catch a falling star."

The freshness and dancing vigor of the words is Playboy's only great distinction, except perhaps for a quality of tough-spirited, oddly joyous compassion--which amounts largely to the same thing. The plotting is tenuous, and the characters while vivid and attractive do not take up permanent residence in the mind, as great comic characters do. The cast of the present revival is not much help. But the play has lived fifty years on its dancing words alone, and it is alive and lovely still.

"On the stage," says Synge, "one must have reality, and one must have joy," and so his County Mayo is neither postcard-picturesque nor socio-economically underprivileged. He allows the audience to hear it as "superb and wild," but for Pegeen Mike Flaherty, who lives in it, it is "this place where you'll meet none but Red Linahan, has a squint in his eye, and Patcheen is lame in his heel, or the mad Mulrannies were driven from California and they lost in their wits"--not a decent man in the lot. Since Pegeen is a romantic, brainy, and spirited girl (well played by Helena Carroll with the right sort of peppery vigor), the local manpower shortage has made her "the fright of seven townlands for my biting tongue" out of sheer frustration.

Into this backwater comes a strange, wild-looking lad with ragged clothes and matted hair, who makes the locals look even paler to Pegeen than they did before. But the interloping "playboy" is not, as might be expected, a muscle-brained stud of the William Inge school, but a shy young man who is quite surprised to discover that by splitting open his father's head he has became a hero to everyone within miles of the Flaherty shebeen. "It's great luck and company I've won me in the end of time," he says, "--two fine women fighting for the likes of me--till I'm thinking this night wasn't I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in the years gone by."

Dermot McNamara plays him as a foolish fellow indeed, pleased but generally unable to cope with the greatness so suddenly thrust upon him. In the process he becomes even more bedraggled and gormless than the natives, and makes it incredible that anyone, much less a bright scornful girl like Pegeen Mike, could call him a lad with "a mighty spirit in him and a gamey heart."

In the third act, the playboy comes back from "the sports" where he wins his title, gorgeous in jockey's silks, and Mr. McNamara decides that it is time for him to grow into his heroic pose. In the ensuing love scene with Miss Carroll he plays it straight, and matches her in eloquence.

In this scene also, for the first time all evening, the heavy clutch of Joseph Gistirak's directorial hand is not in evidence. At other times Mr. Gistirak has his charges constantly engaged in doing little pantomines, in running about the stage, in forming picturesque groupings and dissolving them again, in doing all sorts of unnecessary busy-work. Mr. McNamara especially has been induced, or at least allowed, to pace and fidget and mug past the point of caricature. Synge's purplest prose is as natural and spontaneous as a wild flower, but Mr. Gistirak has tried to manure it with shovelfuls of staginess.

The Irish Players, who have brought The Playboy to Boston after a successful run off-Broadway in New York, are not a first-rate group, and the far limits of the play's potential would be beyond them under the best of circumstances. But they sport adequate brogues, they have a good Pegeen in Miss Carroll, and they do not spoil the permanent freshness of Synge's play.