GROUNDED

by Kate Farrington

Hercules once battled a giant named Antaeus.

Antaeus liked to boast of his phenomenal strength and delighted in challenging passers-by to violent wrestling matches. His opponents never lived to tell the tale. Naturally, when mighty Hercules came across chest-thumping Antaeus in his travels, he couldn’t pass up the challenge. Again and again he threw Antaeus down. Again and again the giant jumped to his feet refreshed and stronger than before. At last Hercules understood—Antaeus’ power came from the earth itself. Each time he touched the ground, he arose renewed. Seizing Antaeus, Hercules heaved him high into the air and began to squeeze. Separated from the earth, the giant’s struggles slowed, and then stopped. Thus endeth the tale of Antaeus.

You might be wondering how we get from Antaeus’ dramatic demise in the hills of ancient Greece to the story of Christy Mahon slinking into a public house on the craggy coast of Ireland. But from the moment we at The Pearl began delving into The Playboy of the Western World, the image of a being whose strength comes from outside himself—from the very ground he stands on—kept springing to mind. It seemed an apt symbol for a play and playwright who draw voice and strength from deep within the particular parcel of earth known as Ireland.

John Millington Synge

John Millington Synge’s fate as a wanderer came as a surprise. His comfortable Anglo-Irish family intended him to become a Protestant minister. Instead, he rambled across the Continent, going where interests led him: studying music in Germany, French literature at the Sorbonne, dabbling in comparisons of ancient Greek and Celtic cultures. He met (and briefly joined) Maud Gonne and W.B. Yeats in their international fight for Irish independence. He published scholarly essays, penned a morose novella on the troubled life of the artist, and produced a few mediocre poems.

Synge was a thoughtful writer, but in those early years there was nothing particularly original

about his voice or style. For a decade he doggedly studied Irish language, history, and literature, but produced little that was peculiarly Irish, or peculiarly…him. His work was a mix of stock images that never quite dug beneath the topsoil of his themes. He lacked poetic nourishment.

He found it in the seemingly unlikeliest of places.

It began as an academic exercise. In 1898, Synge decided to expand his study of the Irish language, a language he had never encountered outside the classroom. Over the course of several years he traveled to the ever-dwindling strongholds of spoken Irish: the Aran Islands, the coast of Mayo, and the shadowy glens of Wicklow. He was enchanted by the poetry and humor of the brisk, idiomatic Irish speech he met there, but also by the Hiberno-English—English as interpreted by Irish speakers—which offered a musical mix of English words and Irish grammar that caught his imagination.

And it wasn’t just the language that entranced him; the people who spoke it were a revelation all their own. He lived side by side with Irish peasants, hearing of  “troubles” brought on by landlords or bad harvests, roaring at their hilarious, hyperbolic accounts of local heroes—often madmen, drunkards, and lawbreakers—and their half-pagan, half-Christian accounts of ghostly apparitions seen on lonely roads. He found in the local culture an improbable blend of humor, recklessness, hospitality, maliciousness, and passion. He had gone to study Irish. He found Ireland.

Image of the Aran Islands between l898 and 1902 taken by the playwright John Millington Synge.

And Ireland, it seemed, was just what Synge needed to bring him, quite literally, down to earth. His classical education now peppered with gritty reality, formal essays gave way to evocative accounts of his travels across Ireland. He wrote of walking through the still, black night and coming suddenly upon a town, the life of its people pouring out of the windows with the light. He wrote of funerals and festivals, and found beauty in the mundane; local women, dressed in red and washing clothes in the surf, were transformed into red-plumed sea birds in his writing. He wrote of Ireland that “one is forced to believe in a sympathy between man and nature.” For Synge the beautiful, treacherous shores and the people who inhabited them were inseparable from each other.

Above all, he wrote the Irish as storytellers—and for Synge there was only one creative form which could portray that aspect of his country. He had tinkered with playwriting before, but a growing friendship with W.B. Yeats finally pulled Synge into the theatrical world for good and all in 1903 with the presentation of In the Shadow of the Glen. He followed it with Riders to the Sea and The Well of the Saints—plays infused with the vitality, both comic and tragic, he had found in ancient myths and at the firesides of fishermen and farmers. In 1907 he offered the Dublin audience the play that would prove his comic masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World.

In a cold autumn night, the light shines out of the windows of a lonely public house where

Image of the Aran Islands between l898 and 1902 taken by the playwright John Millington Synge.

Margaret Flaherty (Pegeen as she is known) laments the lack of daring men in Ireland in these latter days, and complains that there’s no one left in the world worthy of the name of hero.

On cue, in staggers Christopher Mahon, travel-stained and nearly “destroyed walking.” At first “Christy” shrinks from telling the locals what has him abroad in such a state, but with a little coaxing, the denizens of the pub persuade him to reveal the terrible truth: he has murdered his father and has been on the road for ten days for fear of the law.

A pause, and then: “There’s a daring fellow,” one man exclaims. They welcome him with glee, for he must be a fine, brazen man to commit the deed. Pegeen in particular, seems keen on Christy staying with them. By morning, the entire town has heard of the fearless man who slew his Da, and, to his amazement (and delight), timid Christy finds himself declared a hero.

But another traveler is fast approaching the village—one who may spell the end of Christy’s good fortune and force the villagers to face the truth that “there’s a great difference between a gallous story and a dirty deed.”

The Dublin public lost no time in condemning Synge’s own story as a dirty deed. In a time of intense and growing nationalism (the same nationalism that would lead, less than a decade later, to the Easter Rising), how dare this outsider, this Protestant-born member of the landlord class, pass judgment on that sacred figure, the Irish peasant? The peasant was the moral compass of Ireland, the noble remnant of a past that stretched to antiquity. The peasantry most certainly did not embrace murderers or let their daughters fawn over tramps taken in off the road. And above all, how dare Synge make it all so funny?

By the end of the first performance, the actors could not be heard over the shouts, boos, and whistles of the audience. By the third performance W.B. Yeats was onstage shouting back and bringing in policemen to arrest the rowdiest offenders. “I don’t care a rap how the people take it,” Synge huffed. He had not set out to write propaganda for the Irish nationalists, nor to offer a “slice of life” portrayal of the peasantry—he had set out to write a comedy, and the people whose stories and foibles he knew best were the Irish.

Where Synge saw poetry and courage in the Irish heart he also saw barbarous violence, folly, and an idolization of lawlessness that could erupt into bloodshed and murder all too easily. “Parts of it are extravagant comedy,” he wrote in one paper, “still a great deal that is in it, and a great deal more that is behind it, is perfectly serious . . . That is often the case, I think, with comedy.” Christy’s gift of the gab and imagination belong to the Irish men and women Synge had met—and so do his faults.

More than any other writer of the “Celtic Twilight” Synge grounded his characters in the sensual world. They breathe sea air thick with salt, and run barefoot among craggy mountains. Christy speaks of the “love-light” of knowledge in Pegeen’s eyes, but that love is firmly rooted in the dream of the two of them stretched out in the warm sun “making mighty kisses with our wetted mouths.” Synge’s strength as a poet is inseparable from the physical.

As is Christy’s. His first, halting confession of patricide slowly morphs into a gripping tale of battle in his father’s “sloping stony” field with “the sun . . .  shining green on my face.” He woos Pegeen like a bard of old Ireland—discovering vast reservoirs of poetry within himself, and offering her his “poacher’s love” with as much flourish and confidence as if he offered her great palaces instead of lonely mountains. And he doesn’t look to distant lands or past glory for inspiration—his words rise up from the “whity mud, and red mud, and turf, and fine sands of the sea.”

This Irish Antaeus (you knew we’d get back to him) draws poetic strength from the soil beneath his feet and the people who hungrily drink in his words. Their belief in his greatness creates and sustains it—at least for a time.

Synge, like all great playwrights, had a “poacher’s love” for the land and people he wrote about. He picked the stories and characters that fit his needs, tangled images from her pagan past and Christian present, and commandeered the rhythms and cadences of Irish to create a distinctive stage poetry that has inspired playwrights from Sean O’Casey to Martin McDonough. This giant of Irish letters grew great only when he drew his strength from the earth beneath his feet.

After a quarter of a century—with twenty-five theatrical seasons under our feet—The Pearl has received that rarest and most challenging of gifts, the chance to revisit our identity. We perform The Playboy in our new home at City Center Stage II. Our director is The Pearl’s own new Artistic Director J. R. Sullivan. What better play to inaugurate the adventure of the next quarter-century than a work that looks at the world from the ground up, that celebrates language in its most theatrical form, not as a tool of description or rhetoric, but of creation—as the fertile earth from which we draw our strength.

For more information about The Pearl’s production of THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD download our full Playgoer’s Supplement.

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