Riots at theatres, commonplace before the Great War, have mysteriously gone out of fashion. J.M. Synge’s classic, The Playboy of the Western World, was disrupted many times during its opening week in 1907 by Dubliners who objected to its portrayal of the rural poor in the west of Ireland. Strange that, feigning outrage on behalf of an alien caste. It’s like insider trading with an ethical twist. You borrow someone else’s moral identity and sell it at a value which has been inflated by your act of adoption.
Even today this peculiar mechanism keeps the grievance industry going. The protesters in Dublin, many belonging to Sinn Fein, gave up when they realised that the protests were effectively advertising the show. And the causes that motivated them are extinct today so we can see the play for what it is. A classic. A text that will charm any community, and any age, because it appeals to our inner bumpkin. Even a devoted city-dweller understands the penetrating tedium of the countryside, the isolation it produces, the yearning for excitement. And it’s this spiritual deadness that Synge brilliantly evokes and mocks.
The play has the formal structure of a comedy sketch: a crazy opening, three dramatic beats, and an even crazier ending. Christy Mahon, a charismatic drifter, beguiles the womenfolk of a remote Irish village by confessing that he murdered his father. Then his father turns up, wounded but alive, and the villagers’ adoration turns to outrage and contempt. That’s the first hour.
All the elements in John Crowley’s solid production are clean and rather lovely to look at. Scott Pask, the designer, has set the play in the most beautiful Irish hovel you’ll ever see. The filth is to die for. Each stone has been lovingly distressed with soot. The furnishings are ready for the auction room. And above the roof float pretty wisps of blue-grey smoke against a nicely judged Celtic sunset. All that’s missing are the trills of James Galway’s flute. And here they come! Between each act the set spins around to reveal the hovel’s rear wall and a band of rustics, in tailored rags, all plucking away on period instruments and producing one of dem loovely auld Oirish tewns. Which is fine, I suppose. If you can’t crank up the leprechaun factor on this play then you never will. But the core of the piece, the horrific drabness of the rural backwater, comes across far more forcefully if the house is a stinking dump and all the characters, bar Christy, are limping, pockmarked hunchbacks.
Robert Sheehan is likeable enough as the ‘playboy’ himself, if a touch too young and slender. And his rival Shawn (the strapping Kevin Trainor) is so attractive that he makes Pegeen’s preference for Christy seem a bit strange. Ruth Negga, as Pegeen, switches brilliantly between honeyed seductiveness and hellcat fury, and Niamh Cusack is mischievously funny as the lustful Widow Quin. The accents are top quality, too. It’s a shame the show doesn’t sweat and groan and itch and putrefy and ache with boredom and scratch itself embarrassingly, as it might. I was up for more suicidal dullness.
At the Menier, a debut play by seasoned actor Saul Rubinek. The script has been maturing in the author’s mind for many decades, and it looks at two friendships in distress. Awkward, nerdy Stanley asks his handsome friend Jake for advice about his girlfriend. ‘Ditch her,’ counsels Jake. Stanley does just that but the encounter goes wrong and he ends up proposing marriage. Later we learn that Jake had a fling with the girlfriend and lied about it to Stanley.
There’s a sharpness and even a brutality about the script that’s unusual and occasionally refreshing. But the show bumps up against one of the theatre’s strangest obstacles, likeability. There’s some indefinable essence that makes us, secretly, long for Macbeth to succeed and that compels us, secretly, to relish Iago’s devilish trickery. And that essence is missing here. I enjoyed Scott Bakula’s self-adoring portrayal of Jake, and I understood that Andy Nyman’s earnest, whiny vision of Stanley was exactly what the author wanted. But these are tough characters to sympathise with. Caroline Quentin works wonders as Jake’s bubbly and spirited girlfriend, Hedda. But the atmosphere is cold and faintly misogynistic.
The playwright is an experienced film director and one can’t help feeling that this is a movie project that never quite made it. The best moment comes from his CV. ‘Saul Rubinek was born in a refugee camp in Germany after WWII,’ it declares. ‘Saul began working in the theatre in his native Canada when he was eight years old.’ Two births, two continents, one baby. That’s impressive.
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