Hull: Three plays by JM Synge

There will be a rare chance to see three short plays by JM Synge – two comedies and a tragedy in Hull next week.

Ninety years before the delinquent Fr Jack could be heard to holler ‘Drink! Girls!’ in the comedy series Father Ted, the great Irish playwright John Millington Synge was laying into the clergy – and pious hiberno-Catholic sensibilities – in his comedies.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Ireland considered itself ready for self-rule and there was a prevailing nationalist expectation that Irish artists would promote the image of a sober and dependable people. Acting against anti-Irish caricatures, the Abbey Theatre itself (effectively Ireland’s national theatre) declared that one of its goals was to be not the home of buffoonery but of an ancient idealism.

And yet, in his most famous play, The Playboy of the Western World, Synge (a pillar of the Abbey), depicted a village eejit who splits his father’s head open with a spade, tells people he ‘killed his da’, and is lionised for it by flighty women and drunken men. The play led to riots at the Abbey and beyond.

For the nationalist Gaelic League, peasants and women were icons of virtuous Irishness, but Synge – despising what he considered a pious, authoritarian, stultifying hypocrisy at large – ensured that his peasants and women would make puritanical nationalists and their ilk ‘hop’.

There is both a darkness and a wonderful ludic energy in the earlier comedies. In The Tinker’s Wedding, Irish travellers are clear-eyed enough in their identification of an officious, covetous priest’s taste for drink and lechery, and when the priest threatens to denounce them to the authorities for their ‘villainies’ they soon put a stop to his threats with carnivalesque glee. Given the assault upon the ‘holy father’, the play was deemed too incendiary to be performed at the Abbey for a very long time. In The Shadow of the Glen, a frustrated and isolated wife called Nora is given the opportunity to exchange her own dark ‘doll’s house’ and abusive older husband for the freedom of the open road, in the company of a poetic tramp whose name she does not even know.

The tragic Riders to the Sea, based upon Synge’s experiences on the Aran Islands, has been described as one of the most powerful one-act plays in English. The cruel sea provides a livelihood for the islanders but at a terrible cost and the play carries a cosmic grandeur and a ritual depth. In her great elegy, the matriarch Maurya subverts priestly authority and presides over funeral rites herself.

In his plays, Synge drew forth tyrannical patriarchs and fearful younger men as well as strong women, marginalised and idiosyncratic poetic souls, and free thinkers. His dialogue of hiberno-English is celebrated for its capacious imagination, vivid energy and ‘transfigured realism’. Like his transgressive creations, John Millington Synge was an artist-disturber who showed certain members of Irish society aspects of themselves that many didn’t much care to face up to.

Three plays by John Millington Synge will be performed from Wednesday 19 – Saturday 22 February, 7.30pm in the Donald Roy Theatre, Gulbenkian Centre, University of Hull, HU6 7RX. There will be a post-performance discussion on Friday 21 February

Tickets £5, £3 concessions. Telephone bookings and enquiries (or to become a ‘Friend of the Donald Roy Theatre’): (01482) 466607/466141 or via email at gulbenkian@hull.ac.uk.

Dr Philip Crispin, co-director of the production, is a lecturer in Drama at the University of Hull