Marla McLean, left, as Pegeen Mike and Qasim Khan as Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World at the 2023 Shaw Festival.Supplied
- Title: The Playboy of the Western World
- Written by: J.M. Synge
- Director: Jackie Maxwell
- Actors: Qasim Khan, Marla McLean, Fiona Byrne
- Company: Shaw Festival
- Venue: Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre
- City: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
- Year: Runs to Oct. 7, 2023
Newly minted fans of the playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh who discovered his bleak sense of humour watching the Oscar-nominated film The Banshees of Inisherin – as well as fans from his playwriting peak when he was churning out Irish-set black comedies such as The Lieutenant of Inishmore – should head to the Shaw Festival this summer to check out his stylistic great granddaddy J.M. Synge.
The Playboy of the Western World, Synge’s 1907 masterpiece on the subject of morbid curiosity, is now on stage in a production directed by the Shaw Festival’s former artistic leader Jackie Maxwell in the Studio Theatre. The play is rich in language and exhibits a Gaelic gallows humour that’s all the more shocking for being from more than a century ago.
One night on the wild west coast of Ireland, Christy Mahon (Qasim Khan) wanders into a pub in a state. He doesn’t stay shy for too long about why he’s been wandering for days in despair: “I killed my poor father, Tuesday was a week.”
Rather than calling the police to investigate this patricide, impressed pub owner Michael Flaherty (Sanjay Talwar) and his daughter Pegeen Mike (Marla McLean) offer him a job on the spot.
Indeed, as word spread through the village, all sorts of locals show up to meet the confessed murderer and offer him something – with the women in particular finding him fascinating.
In Christy, Pegeen Mike sees a possible escape from her engagement to a timid local named Shawn Koegh (Andrew Lawrie), while the Widow Quin (Fiona Byrne) sees a possible end to the loneliness she’s lived with since her husband died – at her own hands.
Three younger girls – played with wide-eyed wonder by Alexandra Gratton, Jade Repeta and Sophie Smith-Dostmohamed on opening night – are simply excited to set eyes on him.
“And asking your pardon, is it you’s the man who killed your father?” asks one, enthralled, before offering him a “thousand welcomes” and a presenting him with a “brace of duck eggs”
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The girls are portrayed in an outright humorous way, moving like a gaggle of geese, in Maxwell’s production, but mostly the director has her cast play straight.
As Christy, Khan – an actor well known on the Ontario summer circuit from recent season at the Stratford Festival – arrived on stage completely unrecognizable, hunched over and broken. The ridiculous ego of his character only gradually emerged in a comic manner. It’s a part that sees the actor stretch in an exciting new direction.
As Pegeen Mike, meanwhile, McLean plays her character as strong and forceful in a way that only slowly reveals as tragic when she allows herself a moment or two of vulnerability with the newcomer. You feel how trapped she is in this rural village in a time of few opportunities for a woman like her. Byrne, similarly, does some fine dramatic work making her widow more than just wily.
Maxwell’s production is not overly realistic, though. A sense that the three-act play is some sort of collective memory is conjured from the start as Pegeen Mike enters in 1960s clothes and puts on an electric kettle and a radio that eventually plays Irish rock band Them’s My Lonely Sad Eyes.
All the women all seem to be dressed in that era, or thereabouts, while the men appear in early 20th century garb designed by Judith Bowden.
As the plot heads in its proto-absurdist direction, the in-the-round production becomes artier and the invisible walls of the pub become more and more porous until characters are entering and exiting from all angles.
It’s great to see a production that refuses to spell it out for you, but the trade-off is that Synge’s play can sometimes feel a little impenetrable – in terms of the accents, in terms of tone. The audience I saw it with seemed uncertain how to respond, particularly whether they were allowed to laugh.
That’s not necessarily inappropriate for a show that famously caused riots in Ireland and in North America among the Irish diaspora when it premiered, with some angry audience members believing Synge was mocking his fellow countrymen.
That members of a minority might get so angry about representation in a play that they try to close it down used to seem like something out of a history book – but now is once again a familiar impulse. I guess that is to say that The Playboy of the Western World seems like it has an edge once more.
But what does it all mean in the end? Synge wrote that he followed Goethe’s rule: “To tell no one what one means in one’s writings.” I have my theories, but I’ll save them for the pub.