The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays
Though he completed only five plays in his short lifetime, J. M. Synge, co-founder of the Abbey Theater, ranks as one of Ireland’s greatest playwrights. Rescuing the Irish peasant from a romanticized stereotype, his plays capture the essence of the Irish spirit in both his realistic characters and his unique language.
In the Shadow of the Glen
Synge’s first play (1903), based on an Irish folktale, combines the macabre with broad comedy, as an elderly husband fakes his death to test his discontented young wife’s fidelity.
Rider to the Sea
The greatest short tragedy in modern drama, this moving one-act play from 1904 depicts a peasant woman who has lost her husband and sons, one by one, to…
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March 7, 2006John Millington Synge was born in 1871 into an old Anglo-Irish family. Due to ill health he was educated mainly by private tutors before studying at Trinity College, Dublin, and the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He went to Germany to continue his musical studies in 1893 and then, turning to literature, moved to Paris in 1895. There he met W. B. Yeats, who suggested he go to the Aran Islands to live with the islanders as one of them and to "express a life that has never found expression." He spent a few weeks on the islands each year from 1898 to 1902. The Aran Islands did not appear until 1907, but it was his experiences in Aran that gave him the…
The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays
J. M. Synge, Edna O'Brien, Robert Welch
