By Ruby Collins
First performed in Dublin, 1907, John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World arrived at the Lyttelton Theatre in 2025 and is now set to screen in cinemas nationally.
In this production, light-hearted comedy meets uncomfortable tensions and gutting sorrow as small town County Mayo pub faces unprecedented drama.
Set to marry her second cousin, Pegeen Flaherty’s (Nicola Coughlan, Bridgerton) life is altered as young farmer Christy Mahon (Éanna Hardwicke, Fate: The Winx Saga)
stumbles, sheepishly, into her father’s shop.
Motivated by his father’s cruelty and dominance, Christy claims to have killed his father by smashing a loy (an Irish farming tool) on his head. His quick confession of this crime does not upset or disturb this small, religious community but instead exhilarates them.
Playboy marks Caitríona McLaughlin’s, Artistic Director of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, first production with the National Theatre, making some minor edits of Synge’s original playbook including a structural change from three to two acts.
Despite this, McLaughlin remains authentic to Synge’s text and retains his Hiberno-English dialect. While confusing at times for non-Irish viewers, the characters’ language, norms and mannerisms make this production as audiences nationally take a peek into early 20th century rural Ireland.
In this world, the embeddedness of Christian faith pervades even customary behaviours; audiences will note that each time the pub welcomes in a new guest,
exchanges echo ‘God save all here; God save you kindly’.
This faith is strikingly subverted by the villagers’ behaviours, which caused controversy and contempt for Synge contemporaneously as his audience despised his characters’ loose morals and depravity.
As Christy’s popularity in the village rises, he attracts lustful and obsessive attention from the gaggle of village girls and quickly the exceedingly funny Widow Quin (Siobhán McSweeney, Derry Girls) enters the scene. Set on remarrying, Christy becomes the subject of Quin’s sexual fantasies before ultimately revealing his superior affection for barmaid Pegeen.
Now, audiences can appreciate the comedy of these exchanges yet initially, Playboy’s presentation of patricide and female lust was not much appreciated.
Descending into riotous energy and drama, the play and its characters come to their senses, rejecting Christy for his wrongdoings (which, after all, are more complex than even he believed) and demanding he be hanged. The production’s final sequence displays the theatrical range of melodrama as Caitriona McLaughlin draws on physical comedy alongside emotional vulnerability.
Pegeen sobs upon losing her beloved rock the humorous foundations of the play which finishes on a solemn, reflective tone; ‘I’ve lost the only Playboy of the Western World’.
