Trinity College Library Exhibition Celebrates the Centenary of the First Performance of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World
Posted on: 10 January 2007
The Playboy Riots at the Abbey Theatre Remembered by TCD Library Centenary Exhibition
Trinity College Library is celebrating the centenary of the first performance of J.M Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World with an exciting new exhibition which opened on Friday, January 26, 2007 in the Long Room. Synge’s masterpiece provoked a furious uproar at its first production, a 100 years ago on January 26, 1907 resulting in the Playboy Riots.
The contents of the play, a story of apparent patricide, was viewed as an offence to public morals and an insult against Ireland. Synge’s own introduction in the play’s programme stated that the plot of a murderer being hidden from justice by the people, was suggested by an actual occurrence in the West.
There was uproar during the third act at the mention of women “standing in their shifts”. The newspaper, The Freeman’s Journal, called the play a “libel on Irish peasant men and, worse still upon Irish girlhood”. The night of the second performance was the most riotous and so disturbed that little of the play could be heard.
The directors of the Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge, however, held their nerve and the advertised run of the play was completed even though the police had to be called to keep order.
This exhibition draws on Trinity College’s Library’s huge collections of Synge papers as well as printed books, and sets The Playboy of the Western World in the context of Dublin life at the time. Among the items to be displayed are a page of dialogue (later discarded from the play) which demonstrate Synge’s working methods as a playwright; and a letter from Jack B. Yeats with a proposed costume drawing for the character of Christy Mahon. The exhibition will also include notebooks used by Synge to note phrases, words and incidents when he was staying in Kerry, Wicklow and Connemara.
Contemporary newspaper reports are drawn on to give the range of critical reviews and popular reactions to the play. W. B. Yeats gave his considered view in The Arrow, while an irreverent production, The Abbey Row, satirised all the parties concerned in the affair.
Early editions of Synge’s works include The Aran Islands, The Playboy of the Western World, Poems and Translations, all of which were published in Dublin in 1907, and some of the critical works which helped to established his reputation as a dramatist of international stature are also displayed.
The exhibition’s printed works also include translations of the play into German published in Munich in 1912 as well as in French, (Paris,1920), Italian, (Milan,1944) and Hungarian, (Budapest, 1960).
The exhibition which is entitled J.M Synge Revived opened on January 26 and will run until May 31 next. Admission to the exhibition is included in entry to the Long Room and Book of Kells, which is €8. Various concessions for families and older people apply.