March 17, 2001: Synge, Playboy of the Western World
March 17, 2001: Synge, Playboy of the Western World
National Theatre, Cottlesloe
Performed by Derbhle Crotty and other Irish members of the NT ensemble. Directed by a young, new director, Fiona Buffini.
An authentic-looking rustic interior (except for the extraordinarily high, if thatched, ceiling, a concession to the steep rake of the auditorium.
First impressions: very dark, the only light emanating from candles and a realistic-looking peat fire; the slow pace of life. Derbhle Crotty as Pegeen Mike takes plenty of time, at first, and we are struck by the oppressive ordinariness of life in this community — and by Pegeen Mike’s deep unhappiness and frustration, which give an edge to her voice and a certain rigid tension to her body. She is at the end of her patience and is also vulnerable, if skeptical that anything good can happen, especially to her. We get a glimpse of her motherless upbringing in her remark about her only having had a father. We infer the mother died in childbirth, though Synge is tacit on this point. The situation is thus skillfully prepared by Synge, and Fiona Buffoni does his opening pages justice. We are so convinced that life in this place will never change that when Christy Mahon (pronounced “man”, with some ‘h’ in it) slinks in through the doorway in the dim light, an old shawl thrown over his shoulders, his clothes wet through, his face so dirty as hardly to be recognizable, we are not inclined to believe that this unlikely fellow will make things any different.
Buffoni is sensitive to the verbal qualities of Synge’s text: the darkness on stage is simply an extension of the thick “darkness” outside; Pegeen Mike’s presence, alone in this large room, establishes the theme of loneliness iterated by the repeated use of the words “lonely” and “lonesome.” Even God, in Christy’s view, sits “lonesome” in his golden chair. — This, in contrast to the relative crowd of persons young and old (Buffoni introduces a young boy and a tiny young girl into the dozen or more townspeople who press onto the stage at crucial moments in the last two acts), very well managed and realistically distributed on the stage in discrete clusters joined together by one or two “linking” characters.
Patrick O’Kane gives a marvelously energetic performance as Christy, even if his face shines a bit too brightly after he has cleaned himself up and put on the clothes Sean Keogh (pronounced “Kyo”) has given him. The gathering crisis of Christy’s exposure, scapegoating, and eventual turning of the tables on his father is generally skillfully managed, especially the roping and tying up of Christy. But the biting of Sean in the ankle went by too quickly, and the burning of Christy’s foot by Pegeen Mike with a burning sod taken with tongs from the fireplace was somehow not convincing despite Christy’s yowl of pain.
In fact, in the closing moments of the play I began to sense a vagueness in Crotty’s Pegeen Mike. The ending of this play is one of the most complex e