A digital exhibition exploring J.M. Synge’s ‘The Playboy of the Western World’

Posted on: 26 January 2017

A digital exhibition, exploring J.M. Synge’s most celebrated play was launched on its 110th anniversary. On 26 January 1907, J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World was premiered at the Abbey Theatre, and the audience rioted.  In charge at the Abbey, Lady Gregory sent the famous telegram to the absent W.B. Yeats: “Play broke up in disorder at the word ‘shift’”.  That landmark event in the history of Irish theatre is being commemorated on the 110th anniversary today of the premiere by an online exhibition, curated by Nicholas Grene and James Little of the School of English, as a collaboration between the Library of Trinity College Dublin (which holds the collection of Synge’s literary manuscripts) and the Google Cultural Institute. 

The exhibition traces the origins of the play back to the story of the father-killer Synge was told on his first visit to the Aran Islands.  It shows how the language of the play was enriched by the phrases he heard on his visits to West Kerry, even though Synge was to set the action up in the Belmullet peninsula where he toured with the painter Jack B. Yeats on a joint journalistic commission.  Two and a half years of painstaking creative work, almost a thousand pages of drafts, yielded the complex play that produced such a stormy reaction at the Abbey. 

The exhibition shows the changing concept of the characters as realised by outstanding Irish actors such as Bríd Brennan, Marie Mullen and Cillian Murphy.  It culminates in a recreation of the riots themselves echoing through the computer-generated reconstruction of the old Abbey interior, a project designed by Hugh Denard and created by Noho.

For the digital exhibition click here 

Examples of the material contained in the digital  exhibition  include:

• Photographs taken by Synge of McDonagh cottage where he stayed on Inishmaan in May  1898 during his first visit. The cottage belonged to  Patrick McDonagh where he along with  many other visitors to the island,  such as Patrick Pearse stayed.
• The Harris’s Cottage in Mountain Stage, Co. Kerry where he stayed in 1903-06

There are also  many notes  by the playwright himself  that go to build the  narrative of the play.

• The story of the father-killer told to Synge on his visit to Inishmaan in in 1898 and recorded in the first draft of his travel book ‘The Aran Islands’ which gave him the idea of The Playboy.
• There is a notebook entry with phrases he heard on his visit to Mountain Stage ‘mule kicking the stars’ which Old Mahon uses in the Playboy.
• And there are entries for the various endings for the play as well.