The Making of the Playboy

Abstract

YEATS SAID OF The Playboy of the WesternWorld that the inability of the original audiences to understand it represented the only serious failure of the Abbey Theatre movement. The most recent significant appearance of The Playboy took place off-Broadway in 1958, and its reviewers, though generally kind, revealed, like those of the past, some confusion as to the essential import of the play. Indeed, The Playboy seems a work destined to be forever misinterpreted. At the start of its career in 1907 it caused riots because of its alleged immorality; since then it has produced mainly perplexity. Seeing a realistic production of The Playboy, one is made acutely conscious of the problem which Synge himself raised during the first tumultuous week of the original Dublin performance, when he insisted he'd written "an extravaganza" —only to add later that the source of the play lay in his understanding of Irish psyche and Irish speech as they actually existed, thus claiming for the work an ultimate realism.