Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (17 page)

When
Riders
to
the
Sea
,
a sombre presentation of the anguish and resignation of Aran wives and sisters successively robbed by the sea of all their menfolk, was given a first performance in February 1904, it was well received by a small audience, and even Griffith’s paper had to admit its tragic beauty. Aran must have long been associated in the public mind with death by drowning; Petrie’s account of an old Aran woman still grieving for her son lost to the sea, Burton’s painting
The
Aran
Fisherman’s
Drowned
Child
(exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1841, and
circulated
widely as an engraving
19
), the heroine’s drowning in Emily Lawless’s
Grania:
The
Story
of
an
Island
,
20
are some earlier
treatments
of the theme, and Synge’s play, the action of which is always on the point of condensing into ritual, was the definitive celebration of the cult. Folk beliefs of hearth and threshold weigh so heavily if obscurely on speech and gesture in this play that the air its protagonists displace seems thickened with symbol and
significance
.
North, south, east and west are so compulsively evoked as every change of tide and wind brings in new anxiety or despair, that the island itself seethes in a doomful infusion of the compass rose. The elegiac rhythms of Synge’s dialogue are those inherent in the English of native Irish speakers, an English the grammar of which has been metamorphosed by the pressure of Irish, and the words of which have therefore been galvanized into new life by syntactic shock. As (necessarily simplified) examples: Irish has two verbal forms that both have to be translated by parts of the verb ‘to be’ in English;
i
s
, used in identifying two things, and
tá
, used in attributing quality to something; thus
‘Is
é
Beartla
atá
ann’
translates literally as ‘It is Bartley that is in it (
i.e.
there)’. Again, there is no word for ‘yes’ in Irish; instead one repeats the verb of the question: ‘Is it Bartley that is there?’ ‘It is.’ Both these features involve repetition, and thus the possibility of rhythm, when
imitated
in English. Also, Irish is rich in little tags and pieties that prolong a sentence soothingly. Synge calls on all these effects for the simple, death-hushed syllables of this exchange, when the body of one of the drowned sons is brought in:

Here he has avoided the form ‘Is it Bartley that’s in it?’ which in a lighter context he would have exploited. But where there is poetic advantage in it, he will translate word for word, ignoring
dictionary
equivalents: in ‘… no one to keen him but the black hags that do be flying on the sea’, those ominous and mysterious ‘black hags’ come literally from the Irish name of the shag or green
cormorant
,
cailleach
dhubh.
And where poetry would be irrecuperably lost, he does not translate at all: in ‘the dark nights after Samhain’, the Irish word for November is so much more expressive of wind and rain (the pronunciation being approximately ‘sawain’) and the reminder of the ghosts of Hallowe’en,
Oiche
Shamhna,
so much more immediate, that Synge chooses to rely on an Irish audience’s familiarity with the word and its associations, and on an English audience’s intuition of mystery. Douglas Hyde, in his translations of folksongs, and Lady Gregory in her versions of legends, had preceded Synge in the literary exploration of the borderzone between Irish and English inhabited by the folk-people of Ireland,
but Synge is the only playboy of this western world of words, in which he grew to his full freedom and power. Synge’s language is the translation into English not of an Irish text but of the Irish language itself.

The company went on to a great success in London with Synge’s two plays, especially
Riders
to
the
Sea.
In that summer of 1904 it took over what was to become the Abbey Theatre, leased through the generosity of an English admirer of Yeats, Miss
Horniman
, and rehearsals of
The
Well
of
the
Saints
soon began. Synge visited Kerry again, and then, instead of going to Aran as planned, took his bicycle down to Belmullet in the far west of Mayo. This extraordinarily bleak and remote peninsula was to become the setting for
The
Playboy
of
the
Western
World,
although he had picked up the germ of its plot in Inis Meáin.
The
Well
of
the
Saints
was performed in February 1905, and evoked the same rage in nationalist quarters as had
The
Shadow
of
the
Glen.
Indeed this grim and comic morality of uncaring youth and foolish age, in which even sanctity and miracle appear as tactless intrusions into hard-won if fantasizing accommodations with reality, holds little comfort for anyone. The setting is again Wicklow, but the well of the title, from which a roving saint has brought holy water to cure an old blind couple, is the one Synge visited in Árainn in company with old Martin Conneely. He could have heard tales of such cures told of any of hundreds of holy wells throughout Ireland, but perhaps in the dreamworkmanship of creativity there was a link between his plot – of old Martin Doul (
dall
,
‘blind’) and his wife being cured of their blindness, regretting it when they
discover
they are not the beautiful couple they had imagined, and slowly recovering their blindness – and the odd fact of Synge’s being shown a well reputed to cure blindness, by a blind man.

In
Riders
to
the
Sea
the young curate is dismissed near the beginning of the play as powerless to avert the impending tragedy, and the comforts of official doctrine are nowhere called on in its aftermath; the miracle-worker of
The
Well
of
the
Saints
sees his dissatisfied clients stumble off to make their way through a
dangerous
world by the light of their own darkness; similarly, in
The
Tinker’s
Wedding,
which Synge was working on at this time, the wanderers of earth finally assert the irrelevance of the clergy to their life-cycles: ‘it’s little need we ever had of the like of you to
get us our bit to eat, and our bit to drink, and our time of love when we were young men and women and were fine to look at.’ Synge’s tribute to the born anarchs of the Wicklow roads whom he appreciated so much was never staged in his lifetime. The
rejection
of religious authority implicit in most of his work was acted out in this play, in which the tinkers bundle the venal priest into a sack when he refuses to marry them without his ‘dues’ being paid in full. In his preface to the text, published in 1907, Synge hopes that the country people, from tinkers to clergy, would not mind being laughed at without malice, but at the time Yeats was not so optimistic; he felt the play would cause too much trouble for his young theatre, and Synge seems to have agreed. The first
performance
of it took place in London in 1909, after Synge’s death, and it was not seen in Ireland until the year of the Synge Centenary Commemoration, 1971.

In 1905, at the prompting of Masefield, the
Manchester
Guard
ian
commissioned Synge to write a series of articles on the
distressed
state of the Congested Districts. The artist Jack Yeats, younger brother of the poet, was to illustrate the articles, and the two of them explored Connemara and Belmullet in Mayo that summer. On his return Synge wrote to MacKenna:

This is impercipient, as personal and business relationships in the small towns of western Ireland were not more incestuous than in Synge’s own familial or artistic milieus; but then a substantial stratum of Irish life hardly found expression in the works of the Irish cultural revival, which recognized no muse between the ranks
of countess and colleen. However, the imposed theme focused his eyes on the miserable obverse of the rural economics that had delighted him in Aran, and he expressed this darker matter of poverty and exploitation with moving directness. The articles were republished after his death in the 1910 edition of his works, despite Yeats’s feeling that they were inferior. Jack Yeats was later to illustrate the first (1907) edition of
The
Aran
Islands
with twelve drawings, some of them evidently based on Synge’s photographs and only one or two of them remotely adequate to the subtle and vigorous text.

Synge had been engaged in the tempestuous politics of the Irish National Theatre from its foundation, and in the autumn of 1905 he became one of its three directors, with Yeats and Lady Gregory; as he explained in a letter to MacKenna, Yeats looked after the stars while he saw to everything else. Soon afterwards a number of the more politically oriented actors seceded, and among those brought in to replace them was a nineteen-year-old girl, Molly Allgood, with whom Synge was soon in love. He had been living with his mother – for their close relationship still persisted despite her incomprehension of his work – but now he took rooms in the suburbs of Dublin, both to be nearer his theatre and to see more of Molly. She was a cheerful and comparatively uneducated girl whose frank enjoyment of such innocent treats as picnics with other members of the company came to torment the jealous and serious-minded Synge; his Dublin Albertine used to annotate his multitudinous, obsessive and insinuating letters with brisk
one-word
judgements: ‘idiotic’, or ‘peculiar’, or ‘frivolous’. She was also a Roman Catholic, which promised to cause consternation in his family when their affair should become known. But she inspired the love-talk of Synge’s most richly realized character, Christy Mahon of
The
Playboy
of
the
Western
World.
Synge wrote the part of Pegeen Mike in that play with Molly in mind, and she played that role in the first performance in 1907.

The company was anxious about the wildly prodigal language of the play, and presented it to their highly reactive audience with trepidation. Yeats was in Scotland at the time, and after Act Two had been received with attention Lady Gregory sent him a telegram: ‘Play great success.’ But Act Three provoked such an uproar that she sent off another telegram: ‘Audience broke up in
disorder at the word shift.’ The ‘Playboy Riots’ were to become part of theatrical legend. As Synge wrote to Molly the next morning, ‘Now we’ll be talked about. We’re an event in the history of the Irish stage. I have a splitting headache…’ Large numbers of police – the Royal Irish Constabulary, to the
nationalists
an arm of foreign oppression – were called upon to preserve a semblance of order for the following performances, which were largely inaudible. Yeats returned hastily from Scotland, lectured the baying crowd from the stage with courage and dignity, went into court to testify against arrested rioters, and within a few days organized a public debate, in which despite personal reservations he spoke himself hoarse for Synge’s play against a tumultuous audience. Synge himself was at home in bed suffering from
exhaustion
and influenza.

The story of the
Playboy
had been developed out of two
incidents
Synge had heard of in the west: one, of a Connemara man who murdered his father and was sheltered by the people of Inis Meáin for a while, supplied the theme of parricide, and the other, of a Mayo man who assaulted the lady he was employed by, repeatedly escaped from custody, taunted the police in letters and was protected by various lady-friends, added the ingredients of sexual attractiveness and verbal dexterity.
22
Griffith in an editorial described the play as ‘a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform’. While it is clear that audiences came to the play primed by such opinions to be shocked, it should be recognized that
The
Playboy
of
the
Western
World
is genuinely shocking. We, nine shocking decades later, if we are not rattled to our ontologies by a play, tend to want our money back; but it is hardly surprising that those unhardened Dublin audiences, facing such a flood of bizarre talk and action bursting from depths in which tragic, including Oedipal, themes echo like laughter, found it difficult even to pinpoint the source of their disquiet. When Christy at the peak of passion cries, ‘It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only, and what’d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the eastern world?’ they thought they found the word ‘shift’ offensive as being an indelicate synonym of ‘chemise’; in fact it is the steam-hiss of an exorbitant fantasy compressed into a moment. Synge, to some degree, knew what he was at. As he
wrote to MacKenna, ‘On the French stage you get sex without its balancing elements: on the Irish stage you get the other elements without the sex. I restored sex and people were so surprised they saw the sex only.’