Synge (21 page)

They loved the fact that these kids could have been themselves; they loved the honesty of the book, the language, and the simplicity of the story – the theme: children, given the chance and the island, will eat one another. And they loved – God, they loved –
The Playboy of the Western World
.

‘Sir!’

‘Sir!’

‘Me!’

It was, at first, the opportunity to do the voices. The room was suddenly full of Christys and Pegeen Mikes. Even the girl I chose to read the stage instructions became a culchie, an R.T.E. continuity announcer circa 1981. ‘Impty barrels stind near di counter.’

It was mad, wild stuff. A laugh. These Dublin kids got it out of their systems. Every Garda who’d ever told them to move their arses, every teacher who’d ever looked sideways at them, every priest who’d ever let his Mass go over the thirty-five minutes – they all got a slagging in the first few pages of
The Playboy
.

‘Where’s himself?’

Shawn Keogh, ‘a fet ind fair young min’, is the first male character to walk onstage. In the first few days of reading, Shawn came from Kerry, Donegal, Galway, Offaly, Limerick, Wexford and, bizarrely, Scotland. One boy in the class could do a good Sean Connery and decided not to waste it.

‘Where’sh himshelf?’

James Bond had just walked into the shebeen, but Pegeen Mike didn’t even look up. If I remember correctly – and I probably don’t – the first Pegeen Mike, having beaten off the opposition, decided to stick with her own accent. So, for the first five or six pages, Pegeen Mike Flaherty, ‘a wild-looking but fine girl’, came from Briarfield Grove, Kilbarrack, two minutes walk from the Dart station.

‘Isn’t ih long the nights are now, Shawn Keogh, to be leavin’ a poor girl wi’h her own self countin’ the hours to the dawn o’ day?’

James Bond’s response was lost in the roars and wolf-whistles.

It was fun, but not much else, at first. The first few pages were very slow. Pegeen’s shopping list on the first page seemed unnecessarily verbose, and we were expected to watch her write it. And what did those words mean? ‘A hat is suited for a wedding day.’ Did she want a hat? And what was a hat doing on a shopping list? Where were the eggs and the bread? And why all the names on the first two pages? Philly Cullen and Red Linahan, the mad Mulrannies and Father Reilly, Marcus Quinn, ‘got six months for maiming ewes’. It was one line, stop, next line, stop, just like reading Shakespeare for the first time, until they got the hang of it, until they could see it, and hear it, and it began to make great sense.

It did make great sense. And, along the way, it was often hilarious. One of the great successes of my career in teaching came to me unexpectedly, when Shawn Keogh delivered the line, ‘I’m after feeling a kind of fellow above in the furzy ditch’. The Shawn that morning was from somewhere near Kerry, but his accent fell away when he got to ‘fellow’ and he realized what he’d just read, and the other twenty-nine boys and girls in the room realized what he’d just read, and the silence – it lasted less than a second - became a cheer that became a bigger cheer, and bigger, and Shawn Keogh looked at his desk, and under his desk, for the hole he hoped would swallow him whole, and burp. And, after the laughter died and Shawn Keogh rediscovered his spine, I never before saw such keen scholarship; every student was flying through the pages, looking for more lines like that one. I hoped the principal or vice-principal would walk in now; I hoped anyone would walk in. I was listening to the sound of utter concentration. I had control and engagement. And I had silence. No threat or bribe would ever again be as effective. And I had it, the sound of well-used silence – it’s very, very rare – for two long minutes, until someone found Shawn Keogh’s line about ‘the naked parish’.

‘What page, what page?’– and that started another scramble.

Then someone else found the Widow Quin talking about ‘the gallant hairy fellows are drifting beyond’, and that got me up to the bell and the coffee break. I bought myself a Twix.
At first, the language of
The Playboy
was as far away from these Dublin kids as the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Even the simple question from the Widow Quin, ‘What kind was he?’ needed a good looking at before it became, ‘What was he like?’ or something nearer their words. ‘There’s harvest hundreds do be passing these days for the Sligo boat.’ Again, it needed staring at. What was a ‘curiosity man’? And what did ‘Tuesday was a week’ mean? But, as with Shakespeare, the staring was well worth the time. ‘Harvest hundreds’ brought a story about one girl’s grandfather who went from Donegal to Scotland every year to pick potatoes. And, more than twenty years later, I still meet ex-students who smile and say, ‘Tuesday was a week’.

The Playboy
was a hit. It wasn’t just because they could become culchies for the day. They copped on to the story and, unlike the language, the story was immediately theirs. I taught
The Playboy
in the early ‘80s, when many of these kids were going to join the ‘harvest hundreds’. The play was about people on the edge of the rules, and the kids I taught knew that place. Today, that part of north Dublin is often featured in the Property sections – the schools, the sea, all the recently discovered amenities. Back then, it looked much as it does now but, more than once, I saw the word ‘ghetto’ used to describe it. It was no more a ghetto than Ranelagh, but these kids knew the hurt of being written off. They knew the power and fun of language; language was one of the things they owned. Slagging was a sport and an art. The best slag I heard was this: ‘Your granny’d climb out of her grave for a half-bottle of gin.’ Change it a bit and it could be a line from
The Playboy
; it might even have been in the first draft. It’s a
Playboy
line because
The Playboy
is a slagging play. The slags fly across and back across the stage. Pegeen Mike and the Widow Quin, the big women of the play, are particularly good at it – ‘there’s poetry talk for a girl you’d see itching and scratching’. Slagging is a huge part of the play’s energy. Shakespeare knew a well-aimed slag. So did Synge. And so did my students.

And they knew a great story. ‘Tell us a film’ I’d ask one particular student when I was feeling lazy, and he’d stand up and deliver the plot of whatever video he’d watched the night before. I’d seen some of the films; he was much, much better. Is wasn’t just entertainment. I could see that on his face, and I could see it in the faces of the others watching and listening. It was vital; it was power. He had them. These minutes might have been the highpoint of his life. It’s not just the plot of
The Playboy
. It’s the man in the middle, Christy, telling the story, making himself up, assembling himself with words. I don’t know what age he’s supposed to be, what age Synge had in mind when he made him cough offstage, before he walks on, ‘a slight young man … very tired and frightened and dirty’. He’s a teenager. (So is Pegeen Mike.) He’s lost and he’s shy. But he talks; he makes up his story. He’s listened to, and he has power.

Then there’s Christy’s story. ‘ … wasn’t I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in the years gone by.’ Sophocles only had it half-right. No true Irish boy wants to sleep with his mother. But killing the Da is a different proposition. ‘I just riz the loy’, says Christy, ‘and let fall the edge of it on the ridge of his skull.’ Once they knew that a ‘loy’ was kind of a shovel and that ‘riz’ meant lifting it over his Da’s head, all faces in the room lit up. These were teenagers, and all fathers are eejits, and worse than eejits. What else would you do with a shovel? Christy was their man. Better yet, the dead man walks onstage. The play has become a horror film, one of those really funny ones. Then Christy gets to fight his Da again, and he wins again. Old Mahon takes his beating and likes it. Christy pushes him offstage, and follows him. ‘I’m master of all fights from now.’ For the boys in the room, the play ends there. The girls read on, to Pegeen’s lament – ‘I’ve lost him surely’ – but the boys are offstage with Christy.

The fears of the boys and girls, their dreams, their current selves – they’re in
The Playboy
. And – a must for all good school texts – as we read or watch, we see the central characters grow out of their pain, and learn. The first time we see Christy, he’s gnawing a turnip. By the end of the play, he’s biting Shawn Keogh’s leg.

I loved teaching
The Playboy
; it more than made up for
Persuasion
. It’s a great school play because it’s wild and perfect, much like the average teenager.

On 23 May 1903 Synge wrote in his diary, ‘Finished (?) one act Play When the Moon Has Set (?)’. The question marks betray his own doubts about this early work, but also his determination to express himself as a dramatist. Establishing the pattern he would follow in conscientiously saving all his drafts, this version was labelled ‘J’; some time later he returned to the play, producing ‘K’, also unfinished. Though he marked both ‘J’ and ‘K’ ‘Rejected’, they remained among his papers to be read for possible publication after his death. The following text is based on a collation of these two incomplete but apparently final versions of the play whose ideas he had brooded over since 1896.
¹

The play reflects his deep distress at rejection by his first love Cherrie Matheson because of his refusal to accept Christianity, and his belated attempt to counter her beliefs by rewriting history. But all the drafts also reveal Synge’s musical training and the aesthetic, political, and social theories he was developing while studying in Paris, experiencing the realities of life on Aran, and becoming involved in the artistic movements of Dublin. A notebook entry of 1898, repeated in his earlier manuscripts and implicit in this final version reads:

Every life is a symphony. It is this cosmic element in the person which gives all personal art, and all sincere life, and all passionate love a share in the dignity of the world.

For the first time in this early play, that sequence of notes includes what would become the hallmark of his literary style in the vivid dialogue of the servant Bride and the madwoman Mary Costello, his celebration of the natural world, and his sympathy for those courageous enough to pursue their dreams.

Ann Saddlemyer

When The Moon Has Set ~ A Play In One Act

Colm Sweeny,
a young man, heir to his uncle’s estate

Bride
, a young maid

Sister Eileen,
a young nun in a nursing order, a distant cousin to Colm

Mary Costello
, a madwoman

Scene: A country house in the east of Ireland, late spring or early summer at the turn of the century.

Old family library in country house; many books are in shelves round the walls. A turf fire has burnt low in the fireplace, which is on one side, with a large portrait above it. The principal door is on the right, but there is another in the back wall partly covered with a curtain and opening with two battants into the open air. Small window near the fireplace; another to the right of the end-door; both have the blinds down. A large lamp heavily shaded is burning near the table. A large bow of black crepe is resting on one of the chairs near the fire. Bride, a young maid, is kneeling down settling the turf fire.
Colm
comes in on the left, wearing a big coat buttoned up to his chin.

Colm:
[
looking round the room
]
.
Sister Eileen has gone to bed?

Bride
: She has not, your honour. She’s been in a great state fearing you were lost in the hills, and now she’s after going down the hollow field to see would there any sound of the wheels coming.

Colm
. I came in the other way so she could not have heard me. [
Goes to the large window
] Is she long gone?

Bride
.
A while only.

Colm
. I wonder if I could find her …

Bride
: You could not, your honour, and you’d have a right to be sitting here and warming your feet, the way it’s proud and happy she’ll be to see you when she turns in from the shower is coming in the trees.

Colm
[
pulling up the blind
]: I hope she will not miss her way. Perhaps if she sees the door open she will turn back. [
He stands looking out
.]

Bride
[
a
little impatiently
]. She’ll be coming in a minute I’m telling you, and let you be taking your own rest. You’re wanting it surely, for we were thinking it’s destroyed you’d be driving alone in the night and the great rain, and you not used to anything but the big towns of the world. [
She pulls a chair to the fire.
]

[
Colm
comes over to the fire, wearily. He begins taking off his coat and heavy boots. Bride lifts up the bow of crepe from his chair.]