Eugene Benson

A Brief Life

The City of Dublin has long been famous as a centre of culture; this was never more evident than in the second half of the nineteenth century when it was home to such writers of genius as Oscar Wilde, G.B. Shaw, W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge and James Joyce. Of the five, it is Synge who grounds his dramatic art most exclusively in Ireland, finding in her legends and folk tales, and in her peasantry and their speech, the materials of such masterpieces as Riders to the Sea, The Well of the Saints and The Playboy of the Western World. He was, with Yeats and Lady Gregory, a director of the Abbey Theatre and it was his kind of theatre — rather than Yeats’s — that was to influence the Abbey and shape a new generation of Irish dramatists. His is peasant or folk drama which manages, however, to sound themes that are of universal concern. In all his plays, he champions the imaginative life and condemns whatever seeks to restrain human liberty; he celebrates the richness of the solitary and the dispossessed (tramp and tinker) who are oppressed by society (priest and mob); he dramatizes the plight of men and women whose existence in a menacing and meaningless world he invests with passion and poetry and brutality; he experiments with the form of the drama, wrenching it to new shapes to accommodate his uneasy fusing of the tragic and the comic.

Synge and the Theatre

‘Where, but for that conversation at Florimond de Basterot’s,’ Yeats wondered, ‘had been the genius of Synge?’1 The conversation referred to took place in July 1897 when he, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn discussed the feasibility of founding an Irish theatre. The upshot was that a letter was prepared soliciting support and funds, and setting out the ideals of the trio: We propose to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence will be written with a high ambition, and so build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature. We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome, and that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed. We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism.

Deirdre of the Sorrows

The story of Deirdre, of whom it was prophesied that she would bring destruction on the Sons of Usna, is one of the most beautiful and touching of the Irish legends, and has inspired retelling by such writers as Sir Samuel Ferguson, A. E., Eva Gore-Booth, W. B. Yeats and James Stephens.1 While in Aran, in either 1900 or 1901, Synge made a translation of the Irish text, The Fate of the Children of Uisneach, which had been published in 1898 by the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language. When, in 1902, he reviewed Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne, he singled out Deirdre’s lament over the dead Naisi and his brothers as ‘one of the finest passages in the book’. (Prose, p, 369) He wrote to Molly Allgood in 1906, ‘My next play must be quite different from the P. Boy. I want to do something quiet and stately and restrained and I want you to act in it.’2 But The Playboy and illness prevented him turning to the new play; on 22 October 1907, he wrote to Molly: ‘I got a “Deirdre” fit yesterday and I wrote 10 pages of it in great spirits and joy, but alas I know that that is only the go off.

The Wicklow Plays

The Shadow of the Glen, like Riders to the Sea, is based on a story Synge heard on the Aran Islands, but the play receives its atmosphere and characters from the hills and glens of County Wicklow, which is south of Dublin and within easy cycling reach of the capital. It was an area well known to Synge since his childhood. In the Autobiography he writes, ‘To wander as I did for years through the dawn of night with every nerve stiff and strained with expectation gives one a singular acquaintance with the essences of the world.’ The ‘essences of the world’, as presented in Synge’s essays on the Wicklow countryside and its people, resemble — though in a muted, more elegiac tone — those presented in Riders to the Sea. Here, too, nature is hostile, and the people are continually haunted by thoughts of death. The Shadow of the Glen lacks the epic quality of Riders to the Sea but, in compensation, Synge adds a psychological dimension lacking in the earlier play. In The Shadow of the Glen we find more human problems plaguing the men and women of the glens — depression, loneliness, madness.

The Well of the Saints

Synge’s first full-length play, The Well of the Saints, has been received with more enthusiasm by the critics than by audiences, which have preferred Riders to the Sea and The Playboy. It may be that, like the original Abbey players, they find the vision of the play too narrow and intense and the irony too Swiftian in its misanthropy (softened only in the final act). Willie Fay recorded his impression of the play: I realized that every character in the play from the Saint to Timmy the Smith was bad-tempered right through the play, hence, as I pointed out to Synge, all the bad temper would inevitably infect the audience and make them bad-tempered too. I suggested that the Saint anyway might be made into a good-natured, easy- going man, or that Molly Byrne might be made a lovable young girl, but Synge would not budge. He said he wanted to write ‘like a monochrome painting, all in shades of the one colour’.1

Riders to the Sea

Riders to the Sea, Synge’s first play, is an astonishingly mature work of art. Whether we regard it as literature or as drama (a distinction Synge liked to make), it is a masterpiece enjoyed equally in the library or in the theatre; the role of Maurya has a special cachet for actresses like that attached to playing Medea or Lady Macbeth or Hedda Gabler. Like all great works of art it defies definition, seeming inexhaustible in meaning and complexity. The plot is simplicity itself. Maurya, an old woman, hopes that the body of her son, Michael, will be washed ashore. He was drowned nine days earlier. Already Maurya has lost her husband, her father-in-law and four other sons to the sea. When the play opens her two daughters have been given clothes from the body of a drowned man. Before they can discover whether the clothes are Michael’s, Bartley, the youngest son, enters preparing for a journey by sea to the Galway horse-fair. Despite the entreaties of his mother not to go, he sets off. ‘He’s gone now, God spare us,’ his mother cries, ‘and we’ll not see him again.’

A Passage to the Aran Islands

I look on The Aran Islands as my first serious piece of work — it was written before any of my plays. In writing out the talk of the people and their stories in this book, and in a certain number of articles on the Wicklow peasantry which I have not yet collected, I learned to write the dialect and dialogue which I use in my plays.… The Aran Islands throws a good deal of light on my plays. (Prose, p. 47n)