by Colm Toibin
2 A Gallous Story and a Dirty Deed: Druid’s Synge ~ Fintan O’Toole
… a strange man is a marvel, with his mighty talk; but what’s a squabble in your back-yard, and the blow of a loy, have taught me that there’s a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed. – Pegeen Mike, The Playboy of the Western World
It is obvious enough now, but at the time the excitement was too visceral, the surprise too thrilling, for anyone to see it. Initially, Garry Hynes’s landmark production of The Playboy of the Western World, which took shape over seven years between 1975 and 1982 stood out for what it was not: not soft, not romantic, not redolent of what W.B. Yeats, in an entirely different context, called ‘the stale odour of spilt poetry’. It was, above all, not the Abbey. The lush and languid had been replaced with the raw and immediate. Sex hung in the air and dirt clung to the floor. The Widow Quin was hungry for a man’s body. Christy picked the caked mud from his bare feet. You could almost put your finger into the gaping gash on Old Mahon’s head. When Pegeen went to burn Christy’s leg with a sod from the fire, you knew that if it touched his flesh, it would corrode all the way to the bone. The Playboy, in other words, was not a classic revival, but a new play and a whole new ball game.
It wasn’t just that we hadn’t seen Synge like this before, but that we had barely seen him at all. Synge’s impact beyond Ireland had been evident from time to time, in Mustapha Matura’s 1950 transposition of The Playboy to Trinidad, The Playboy of the West Indies, or Bertolt Brecht’s 1937 play Señora Carrar’s Rifles which adapts Riders to the Sea to the Spanish Civil War. But this idea of Synge as a great contemporary figure scarcely existed in Ireland in the 1970s. The context for Druid’s Playboy was one in which Synge was a famous but little produced playwright. He did not occupy the world stage. The world saw Synge as Ireland’s property, and Ireland saw him as the Abbey’s. But even at the Abbey, the real extent of Synge’s importance never quite matched the general perception.
Between 1907, when it was first produced, and 1966 The Playboy had 249 performances at the Abbey – just two more in total than George Shiels’s comedy Professor Tim, which was first produced in 1935. The Shadow of the Glen had 239 performances in 63 years – just 23 more than Frank Carney’s potboiler The Righteous Are Bold had in 20 years. (An incidental mark of the relative neglect of Synge is that no one is even sure of the title of the play, which appears in printed editions and in theatre programmes as both The Shadow of the Glen and In the Shadow of the Glen.) Between 1950 and 1970, Synge had been represented on the Abbey stage only by a 1960 staging of Riders to the Sea. The Tinker’s Wedding remained unperformed at the Abbey until the year of Synge’s centenary celebrations in 1971. (It was first staged in Ireland just eight years earlier, at the Pike Theatre, as part of the 1963 Dublin Theatre Festival.) When Eric Bentley directed at the Abbey in 1950, he was told by Ernest Blythe that Synge ‘emptied the theatre for five years’.
The other national cultural institution, RTE television, had made The Well of the Saints its second-ever drama production in 1962, but then lost interest. There was a production of The Shadow of the Glen in 1964, after which the station never again broadcast a Synge play. Synge existed in the worst kind of artistic limbo. He was a semi-official figure, paid too much empty homage as a national treasure to be interesting to the young and yet too neglected to be a real, serious presence in the culture.
This context meant that what was most revealing about Druid’s Playboy in the late 1970s and early 1980s was what is now most obvious. It told us that Synge is a great playwright and that The Playboy is arguably the greatest comedy in the English language since the 17th century. It announced that someone who had seemed defunct was riotously alive. And that was more than enough to be going on with. Only in retrospect can we ask what it was that made that production, and not just the play itself, a great work of art.
Synge himself had an emphatic approach to such a question. He believed that greatness is a matter of resonance, of the way the individual expresses the general. This belief, indeed, is what made him a playwright. Theatre is a public form, one that requires its audience for its completion. Time and place, the here and now, are bred into its bones. In the late 1890s he noted for himself that
Goethe’s weakness [is] due to his having no national and intellectual mood to interpret. The individual mood is often trivial, perverse, fleeting, [but the] national mood [is] broad, serious, provisionally permanent … each work of art must have been possible to only one man at one period and in one place … the great artist, as Rembrandt or Shakespeare, adds his personal distinction to a great distinction of time and place.
In another note, he added that
No personal originality is enough to make a rich work unique, unless it has also the characteristic of a particular [time] and locality and the life that is in it.
What was the national mood of Ireland in the late 1970s and early 1980s? What was characteristic of that time and place? Many things, of course, but one overarching sensation was the starkness of the space that separated rhetoric from reality, words and their referents, what we said from what we did. This was a period of transition, when the emptiness of inherited rhetorical systems was increasingly apparent, but those systems still held sway. While social realities were changing and official ideologies were slipping inexorably into crisis, the old languages of nation, church and state were, if anything, given a new urgency by a sense of panic. Conservative Catholicism was rallying in the last ditch, its apparent revival indicated by events like the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979 and the successful campaign for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Charles Haughey came to power as Taoiseach and set about obscuring his own divisiveness by refurbishing the old rhetoric of national unity. The conflict in Northern Ireland, which itself had revived the traditional rhetoric of Irish nationalism, was entering a new phase of highly-wrought, and self-consciously theatrical symbolism with the dirty protests and hunger strikes by IRA and INLA prisoners in the H-Blocks.
Yet all of these attempts at recreating an old language of inherited certainties were in fact symptoms, not of revival, but of decline. The authority of the Church was slipping away. The economy was in decline. Mass emigration was starting up again and would continue to such an extent that the population of the Republic actually declined in the 1980s. Stable government become almost impossible: in 1981 and 1982 alone, there were three general elections in the Republic. And while the rhetoric was being ratcheted up, while words were uttered at an ever-higher pitch, the body was intruding with a strange, sometimes grotesque insistence. As the body politic wasted away, the body itself became a bizarre obsession. One set of images that dominated the island in 1981 and 1982 was the harrowing, pre-historic figures of unkempt men with long hair and long beards, each wearing nothing but the blanket that covered a naked, dwindling body. These spectres haunted Ireland like emanations from some collective nightmare. And alongside them were the spectral body parts of women. As the abortion debate took hold in the early years of the 1980s, wombs, eggs, sperm, periods, embryos, ectopic pregnancies and ovaries became the terms of political debate.
This contrast between mighty talk and backyard squabbles, between gallous stories and dirty deeds, between language and the body, was played out, above all, in the violence of the Northern conflict. From day to day, large verbal abstractions – United Kingdom, United Ireland – were boiled down to dirty deeds and broken bodies. The great gap between what was said and what was done was a ditch filled with torn flesh and shattered bones.
It is striking that John Synge was one of the figures to whom those in power appealed in their efforts to occlude this crisis and to re-assert, in the face of its disintegration, the fundamental stability of their Ireland. In his last major speech before becoming Taoiseach, a speech that was a key part of his pitch for the leadership of Fianna Fail, Haughey actually cited the controversy over The Playboy in 1907, fusing, as it were, Patrick Pearse and John Synge into a single
embodiment of the sophisticated, modern nationalism that he himself claimed to represent. Pearse, he said,
was a man of far-ranging literary sympathies. It is a matter of historical fact that alone among the national intellectuals of the time, he defended the right of the Abbey to produce The Playboy and the inalienable right of men of genius to portray Irish life as they saw it.
(The claim is significant because it is so disingenuous. Though Pearse later changed his mind, he condemned Synge at the time of the Playboy riots as a blasphemer ‘against the moral order of the universe’, the preacher of ‘a sinister and unholy gospel’, and an ‘Evil Spirit’ who ‘railed obscenely against light and sweetness’.
A year before the classic 1982 Druid production of The Playboy, Haughey again recruited Synge to his own brand of nationalist cultural conservatism. Speaking of the Blasket Islands (one of which, of course, he owned), Haughey told the Royal Irish Academy in March 1981 that
Synge went there, as did many other scholars and literary men, and found that they provided a special link with the immemorial past of Ireland and the Irish people.
Haughey’s Synge was the icon of an imagined cultural continuity, a Protestant who had understood that the real Ireland was to be found in an untouched and sacred West:
John Millington Synge and his generation set, as many artists still do, a special value on all those things which connected us with Ireland’s past, and they found them in the remote but beautiful and tradition-rich places of the West, where the language and lore of an ancient people lived on. It is right for any country to value this sort of unbroken continuity in its experience.
Haughey linked Synge’s alleged search for the immemorial Ireland with his own programme for ‘preserving’ conservative values which were imagined as similarly timeless. The Irish, he claimed, were almost uniquely devoted to the past: ‘there is scarcely any other people who emotionally are so attached to their inheritance.’
Druid’s production of The Playboy can be seen in retrospect as a demolition of Haughey’s official version of Synge, with its age-old continuities, its static, idealized West of Ireland and its attempt to turn the man who could write that ‘every healthy mind is more interested in Tit Bits than in Idylls of the King’ into a romantic antiquarian. But it was not, of course, a primarily political statement. While it would be patronizing to imagine that Garry Hynes and the actors and designers were unaware of the political resonance of what they were doing, they were concerned, first and foremost, with the making of a piece of theatre. It so happened, however, that Druid’s explorations of ways of making theatre concerned the same things that informed both the public mood of the time and Synge himself: the gap between language and the body, between what is said and what is done.
Before Garry Hynes, Synge’s plays were magnificent verbal constructs, whose poetry was to be digested and relished, but whose literary density placed them at odds with modernist theatre. When Shelagh Richards produced The Tinker’s Wedding in Salzburg in 1949 – presumably the first production by an Irish director – Eric Bentley, watching the rehearsals, was fascinated by the way the play was approached as a purely linguistic artefact:
Miss Richards stands in direct opposition to the fashionable directors of the moment in that she does not believe in the predominance of the mise-en-scène. The bulk of her attention in rehearsals goes to the rendering of the lines, phrase by phrase, word by word.
But even the sympathetic Bentley tended towards the conclusion that this elaborate, highly-tuned language meant that Synge was too good for this world:
Even given a correct and eloquent speaking of the lines, Synge’s Ireland is not easily rendered in the dingy naturalistic peepshow of the urban stage.
Druid’s Synge was never about neglecting or marginalizing the spoken word, but it was rooted in a belief that the plays were not, after all, too delicate for the peepshow of the urban stage. The company evolved in its early years through its Synge productions: The Playboy in 1975, The Shadow of the Glen and The Tinker’s Wedding in 1976, The Playboy again in 1977 and 1982. Garry Hynes and the actors had tested Synge’s texts in performance, and had approached them from a variety of angles. By the time of the 1982 production, Marie Mullen who played the Widow Quin, had already played Pegeen Mike. Mick Lally, who played Old Mahon, had already played Christy. These key actors thus knew the roles that, at times, they were playing against. There was a depth of involvement, an ease with the language, that created a confidence in the sheer theatricality of the plays.
But alongside that journey, there was also an exploration of the non-verbal elements of theatre, and in particular of the way they could co-exist with a dense text. The Druid production of Hynes’s own play Island Protected by a Bridge of Glass in 1981 can be seen in retrospect as a testing ground for the physical and visual expressiveness that would go into the making of an achieved Druid style of playing Synge. At the time, reviewing it for In Dublin, I was stunned by the sheer variety of techniques brought to bear on the play:
Druid raid every available cupboard for the elements of the drama. Use is made of the sparse, rapid flow of language into space of Beckett (Not I comes particularly to mind at times), the comic representation of ideas by objects and the caricatures of agitprop farce, the folk rhythms and stylized dance of Siamsa, mime, and the marvellous music of De Danann. At times, the imaginative simplicity of Garry Hynes’s use of objects such as long sticks is startling and the energy created by the quick succession of forms and methods is irresistible.
This was not simply a matter of testing the ways in which words and images could work together, however. It was also about figuring out how they could work against each other. For Hynes’s mature approach to Synge, as it emerged in the 1982 Playboy, overturned all notions of him as a figure of continuity who represents an archaic, unified world. It enacted, rather, the electrifying tensions and the coiled-up contradictions within the world he presents. We heard the beauty of the language, enhanced by the fluency of actors who understand it, but we saw the grime and poverty of the characters’ lives. The style was more realistic, less romanticized, than what had gone before – we saw bare, dirty feet rather than the picturesque pampooties that were worn even in the original Abbey production. Yet it was also wilder, stranger and more plugged into the anarchic, carnivalesque comedy of Synge’s imagination. There was a soft, tender yearning and a frantic, compulsive energy. The playing was precisely detailed, with each moment full of deliberation and control, yet it also unleashed all the gothic and grotesque elements of the writing. The characters were rooted and credible, but they also expanded into physical caricatures of themselves.
In that 1982 Playboy, the actors seemed to inhabit the same stage but come from different planets. Brid Brennan’s Pegeen was still, watchful and, for all her outbursts of bossy rage, intensely innocent. Marie Mullen’s Widow Quin, by contrast, was nonchalant, impervious, avid for a man but too worldly to be hurt, her eyes hungry, predatory but also full of salty humour. Mick Lally’s Old Mahon was a hulking bear, Ray McBride’s Michael James an evasive ferret. Maeliosa Stafford’s Christy expanded and strutted as Sean McGinley’s Shawn Keogh shrank and lurked. And all this human variety created a shifting, unpredictable universe in which no simple chain of events could be traced from cause to effect. In the constant interplay of contrary moods and conflicting impulses, words were not just static poetry but gestures of continual self-invention. The language had restored to it the theatrical energy of people making themselves up through speech. The old question – how do I know what I think until I see what I say? – hovered over every line. Synge’s own paradoxical phrase for the kind of national mood that enables great art – ‘provisionally permanent’ – came to mind, capturing perfectly the fusion of a permanent text with a radically contingent performance that is the essence of theatre.
Just as the 1982 Playboy drew on apparently unrelated productions like Island Protected By a Bridge of Glass, so it was continued in productions o
f other plays, most immediately the superb 1983 production of M.J. Molloy’s The Wood of the Whispering, again directed by Garry Hynes and again featuring Mick Lally, Sean McGinley, Maeliosa Stafford, Ray McBride and Marie Mullen, and the breathtaking 1985 premiere of Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire, with Mullen, Mary McEvoy and Siobhán McKenna. Each, of course, had its own dynamic, but each, too, reminded us that Druid’s Synge is not just about Synge. Bailegangaire is a wonderfully original masterpiece in its own right, yet the resonance of The Playboy could be felt in two ways. One, most obviously, was the language of Mommo’s story, a Gaelicized English that represented the fullest linguistic flowering in contemporary theatre of seeds that Synge had planted. The other was the absolute confidence with which that production approached the unusual structure of the play, in which the world of Mommo’s baroque narrative co-exists on stage with the more mundane reality of the contemporary action. It is hardly accidental that the split is, again, that between a gallous story and some dirty deeds, or that the brilliance of the production was rooted in Hynes’s evolution, through The Playboy, of a theatrical style precisely calibrated to just such a conflict between what we see and what we hear.
If Druid’s Synge is about more than Synge, however, it has always seemed to me that it is also about another, curiously absent figure – Samuel Beckett. On the surface, this may seem a ridiculous suggestion. Beckett was an early presence in Druid’s repertoire: the company presented Act Without Words II in its very first season in the summer of 1975, and Happy Days the following year. But there have been just two Beckett productions since: Endgame in 1981 and Waiting for Godot in 1987. Yet it could be argued that there is so little of Beckett in Hynes’s repertoire for the same reason that there are, allegedly, no camels mentioned in the Koran: his is such a constant presence that there is no need to advertise it.