The Playboy of the Western World

I have not presented any works of literature here before (unless you think of Lord Buckley's spiel as being a kind of literature), so I'm going to offer a few plays associated with Dublin's Abbey Theatre and recorded in the mid-50s by a troupe led by Cyril Cusack.

First is John Millington Synge's tragic farce of life among the peasants, The Playboy of the Western World, which made the Abbey famous due to a riot at its 1907 opening. The play was attacked from all sides, being denounced variously as a calumny upon the Irish people, a slur upon Irish womanhood, indecent and (by Sinn Fein) insufficiently political. It has also been denounced on literary grounds, with the likes of James Joyce complaining that the language of the peasant caste is unrealistically poetic.

Portrait of Synge
by John Butler Yeats

I am more of the mind with the prevailing opinion since then that this is one of the finest plays ever written. As Louis MacNeice writes in the insert booklet, Synge "has produced, in this his greatest play, through the medium of dialect, something more truly poetic than any of our verse drama since the Elizabethans."

The story of Christy Mahon, and how he became popular by belting his father in the head with a spade, The Playboy of the Western World is both deeply cynical about human nature and deeply sympathetic to the inhabitants of the human condition. It is many faceted, truly original and very influential, and is here presented by a superb group of actors led by Cusack as Mahon. Siobhán McKenna is Pegeen Mike and Marie Kean is the Widow Quin. The 1955 recording is apparently based on a 1953 production directed by Cusack. The three also appear in a recording of Juno and the Paycock by Synge's successor, Sean O'Casey, which I will be presenting here.

McKenna and Cusack

McKenna also appeared in a 1961 film version of The Playboy of the Western World. I have the soundtrack LP from the film, and I've been meaning to share it here for a long time. The score is by composer Seán Ó Riada, notable for his importance in the revival of Irish traditional music. That record is now packed away, but I will transfer it if and when I locate it.

J. M. Synge was not prolific, and died young. The insert booklet implies this was somehow due to the reception of The Playboy of the Western World, but that's not true. He died of Hodgkin's disease in 1909.

The download includes the insert booklet and the text of the play. Sound is excellent.