The Playboy of the Western World E-Book

John M. Synge

• Herausgeber: Mercier Press
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1986

Seitenzahl: 132

Beschreibung

John Millington Synge's classic work set in Mayo. A mysterious traveller, Christy Mahon, arrives in the village believing he has killed his father. He is looked upon as a hero by the locals and falls in love with one of them, Pegeen Mike, who agrees to marry him. But when Christy's 'murdered' father appears on the scene, Christy's fortune takes a downturn with comic and tragic result. The Playboy of the Western World is, undoubtedly, Synge's masterpiece. It was produced at the Abbey Theatre in 1907 and provoked an immediate riot and continuing controversy. This edition of the play is introduced by renowned Kerry actor Éamonn Keane whose interpretation of the role of Christy Mahon ranks him with the greatest actors to have played this part.

Leseprobe

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Introduction © Éamonn Keane

The pen drawing by Jack B. Yeats is reproduced by kind permission of Anne and Michael Yeats.

ISBN: 978 0 85342 406 2

Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117 510 1

Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 511 8

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

No actor plays his part without having made a minute study, not alone of the character he plays, but also of the characters who appear with him. These characters in turn are developed by his fellow-actors as they interpret the playwright’s work. The play’s director has the choice of imposing his personal interpretations of characters on his cast or of harmonising his actors’ expositions of their roles. Either way this means a great deal of discussion between actors about their parts. One of the more memorable productions ofThe Playboy of the Western Worldof recent times was given in Belfast’s Empire Theatre where Éamonn Keane played Christy Mahon opposite Siobhán McKenna’s Pegeen Mike.

In the following introduction Éamonn Keane gives us the actor’s approach toThe Playboy of the Western Worldand his own impressions of the play based on his wide experience of playing in the works of Synge.

Introduction

We each bring to the fine art of the theatre our own feeling, our own past experience, our own appreciation. For the romantic, the blood-and-fire intimacy between actor and audience may be the greatest love affair imaginable, while the dedicated realist, prior to curtain-up may mutter to himself above the chatter of the assembling audience, ‘The old foes stir outside, God bless their souls for that.’

And what is it like ‘outside’? What kind of a house? There are the newspapermen, who may, happily, record the merits of a play or a production or a performance for posterity, through the literature of dramatic criticism: the arid academics who may cut the skylark’s throat to see what makes that sensitive minstrel sing: the materially poor who come to this temple for the enrichment of their souls: and of course, the idle rich, some of whom come for the same purpose. But there, there in the cheapest seat of all is his imperishable, argumentative, properly eccentric self, The Odd Man Out, beholden to no one thank you, and as much alive today as he was in the Golden Age, when the butcher and the carpenter rubbed shoulders with the Earls and the Shakespeares in the old Globe Theatre. Aye! The Odd Man Out, and we haven’t lost him yet, the only play-goer of the western world. Emboldened by the memory of uncanny observation, instinctively blessed with imaginative insight, this natural enemy of the mediocre and the fake is a law unto himself. Thus, in a Dublin theatre some years ago, during a superb production of The Only Way, when an impeccable Sydney Carton was on the point of lowering his magnificent head to the guillotine, the raucous voice of Odd Man squawked sacrilegiously from the Gods, ‘Hey there, Mister-me-friend, tha’s not the way Martin Harvey done it!’ Maybe ’twas true for John Synge in the end of all – the theatre only instructs as it delights.

But – and this is the purpose of my antic introduction to the purest love story of the stage since Romeo loved Juliet and Cyrano worshipped Roxanne by proxy – what did Odd Man Out think ofThe Playboy of the Western World?I had just witnessed an Abbey production of the play some nights before and had been appalled by the spectacle of Christy Mahon and Pegeen Mike quite unnecessarily locked in a torrid Hollywood clinch punctuated by some idiotic osculation. My distaste was incurred first by the fact that Synge’s jewelled and searing language needed no such obvious embroidery, and secondly, that the clinch took from the piquant heartbreak of the lovers’ parting at the end. If Pegeen did not have the solace of even a kiss to remember her Christy by, her desolate cry of ‘Oh, my grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve lost the only playboy of the Western World’, would be the more desolate, and the parting more memorable.

Christy Mahon for me, is an essentially Irish character, something like Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin. At his first entry, such a quiet docile entry, when Pegeen says to him, ‘You’re one of the tinkers, young fellow, is beyond camped in the glen?’, while he is docile he prepares us for his pride afterwards, when he says, ‘I am not then, but I’m destroyed walking’, and when Michael suggests that Christy may be wanted for robbing or stealing, he replies: ‘And I the son of a strong farmer, God rest his soul, could have bought up the whole of your old house a while since from the butt of his tail pocket and not missed the weight of it gone’. He shows his sensitivity that he could be mistaken for a tinker or a tramp. But then when he tells Pegeen about having ‘Wild and windy acres of rich Munster land’ he is developing the deception which his strange welcome in Mayo has aroused. Whether Christy be interpreted as a braggart or a coward at his first entry, for me there is a moment of great beauty when he looks at Pegeen and Pegeen looks at him, a moment which says without words that he is the answer to all her prayers and she the answer to his. This is what gives him the hope to say later on to her, ‘You’ve a power of rings, God bless you, and would there be any offence if I was asking are you single now?’ It was such a very pure remark and it shows how very much he was at heart a shy man. Later when he expresses his lonesomeness we are inclined to ask ‘Was it this that drove him out from Kerry?’ Was he looking for his true love like Don Quixote setting out to follow his dream? While present-day playwrights have to be very sensational about love in their plays, Synge, because he was such a shy man himself, put an awful lot of himself into the part of Christy.

Pegeen would be in the same category as Nora in Synge’s play The Shadow of the Glen. Nora has married an old husband and is first attracted to the tramp, Michael Dara when she meets him driving ewes up the path. The tramp, because he weaves for her the beauty of nature and the heritage of an unencumbered future, can bring her off with him to hear ‘herons crying over the black lakes’ – ‘fine songs when the sun goes up and there’ll be no old fellow wheezing, the like of a sick sheep, close to your ear’. In the same way while Pegeen, as the daughter of a publican, has a sure match with Shawn Keogh, the very fact of his false and critical religiosity makes him fall short of her ideal of true love.

I look on Christy as a Kerryman and so my interpretation would emerge from going back into my own childhood and finding similarities in my behaviour to his especially when Christy tells the Widow Quin and the other girls about how his father tries to make a match between him and some old widow who had money because the old man only wanted ‘her hut to live in and her gold to drink’. Was it because his sense of what was beautiful and good in love was appalled by this match that he raised the loy and struck the first blow? Was he running off from the flavour of a money-match? I would also bear in mind that there was in him a lovable roguery that made him spin out his fantasy to the very end. Mayo was a new land to be conquered, like the windmill that Don Quixote saw. I would also see him as a poet who, like so many Irishmen, excels in conversation, and their genius for speaking is so often either spent in the pub or in late night sessions at the céilidhes and family houses. But I see that Christy did not have the ability to turn his gift to practical use. With this ability he might have been a higher civil servant. I always see him rather as a ‘spailpín fánach’, one who would not stay settled and, even if he won Pegeen, I think that he would go romancing throughout his lifetime. Pegeen did want him as a romancer, but also as a ‘loyal young lad to have working around’.

We do get a sense of Christy as a layabout at the beginning of Act II where, while cleaning Pegeen’s boot he says ‘well, this’d be a fine place to be my whole life,

talking out with swearing Christians, in place of my old dogs and cat, and I stalking around, and never a day’s work but drawing a cork an odd time, or wiping a glass, or rinsing out a shiny tumbler for a decent man’. But at the end of the play, when people jeer him, maturity is thrust upon him and he shouts: ‘Shut your yelling, for if you’re after making a mighty man of me this day by the power of a lie, you’re setting me now to think if it’s a poor thing to be lonesome, it’s worse maybe [to] go mixing with the fools of earth.’ They have goaded him on so much that he uses his father as the exorcising force to rid himself of his former timidity, and this is the sacrifice that he uses to achieve his manhood. The wonderful comicality of all this is that the Playboy does not see it as a crime at all because he says to his father, ‘Are you coming to be killed a third time, or what ails you now?’. His father, too, says, ‘For what is it they have you tied?’ and when Christy tells him that he’s being taken to the peelers for slaying his father the Kerry clannishness comes out and Mahon frees Christy and says, ‘My son and myself will be going our own way, and we’ll have great times from this out telling stories of the villainy of Mayo and the fools is here.’ And they go off together laughing their way to another county.

We are left in doubt as to whether the Playboy had a mother and this might account for the fact that he appeals so much to the Widow Quin to help him and says to her to ‘aid me for to win Pegeen’. I often wonder does he see her as the mother he had, or does he imagine her as the mother he didn’t have because we are left in doubt as to any maternal influence in his life. In fact, Christy can talk more sincerely to Widow Quin about his love for Pegeen than to Pegeen herself. He has to resort to lyrical flights to tell his love to Pegeen. It is to the Widow Quin that he opens his heart.

Christy’s father had an element of the playboy in him, too. When I played the part of Christy I first of all examined the character of Old Mahon. He has the same boastfulness as Christy talking of the ‘windy acres of rich Munster land’, and he says, ‘Amn’t I the great wonder to think I’ve traced him ten days with that rent in my crown?’ Christy was so impressed by the gargantuan image of his father: ‘I’d come walking down where you’d seen the ducks and geese stretched sleeping on the highway of the road and before I’d pass the dunghill, I’d hear himself snoring out a loud, lonesome snore he’d be making all times, the while he was sleeping, and he a man’d be raging all times, the while he was waking like a gaudy officer you’d hear cursing and damning and swearing oaths.’ Christy was strongly influenced by this from his early years. His description of his father is significant: ‘and he after drinking for weeks, rising up in the red dawn, or before it maybe, and going out into the yard as naked as an ash tree in the moon of May, and shying clods against the visage of the stars till he’d put the fear of death into the banbhs and the screeching sows’, Old Mahon must have been some very special sort of man in Christy’s eyes.

The element, too, of the spailpín fánach in Old Mahon is suggested when Christy talks of his brothers and sisters ‘walking all great territories of the world’ and that all of them would be only anxious to curse him, and we must remember that Christy had stayed alone in Kerry with Old Mahon. In Act III then, ironically, Old Mahon sees his son in a new light outstripping all the Mayo men in the races, and he speaks of himself with great pride reminiscent of Christy’s boastfulness, ‘I was a terrible and fearful case, the way that there I was one time, screeching in a straightened waistcoat with seven doctors writing out my sayings in a printed book. Would you believe that?’