This Day in Theater History (Synge’s “Riders to the Sea” Premieres)

February 25, 1904—At the conclusion of the premiere of Riders to the Sea, at Dublin’s Molesworth Hall, members of the Irish National Theater Society that had staged the play might have been forgiven for thinking they had a flop on their hands, for nobody in the audience clapped. 

The reaction, however, had less to do with theatergoers’ dissatisfaction than with their stunned recognition that the one-act tragedy by John Millington Synge was the budding Irish theater movement’s answer to ancient Greek playwrights like Sophocles and Euripedes.

The dilemma faced by Maurya, an elderly peasant in the West of Ireland—the loss of all of her sons—is staggering, the kind faced by mothers in the wars that convulsed ancient Greek city-states. The Irishwoman, however, was battling the elements rather than military or civil authorities.

The theme of the play, of course, is man’s helplessness in the face of death. It was a dread with which Synge was all too familiar.

Late the prior year, a swollen neck gland, coupled with a debilitating cold, had excited longstanding health fears enough that the playwright feared he had now contracted tuberculosis. 

He had rallied, but his anxieties were not misplaced: In 1909, he passed away from Hodgkin’s Disease at age 37, leaving a huge void in Irish—indeed, world—drama.

Written in a far different key than his later tragicomic masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, Riders to the Sea shared with that play a fascination with Aran Islands diction. You can see it in one of its opening lines: “It’s a shirt and a plain stocking were got off a drowned man in Donegal.”

That line makes a character sit up and take notice, and it made the world do so, too, showing that poetry and high art could be spun from the lives of seemingly simple people who, nevertheless, struggled with burdens that would have bowed those far mightier in the world, including the flawed royals who concerned Sophocles.

(The image accompanying this post comes from Ralph Vaughan Williams' 1937 one-act adaptation of the tragedy for the opera—in this case, in a 2021 collaboration among Ballet-Opera-Pantomime (BOP), Montréal‘s I Musici chamber orchestra, and the Opera de Montreal ‘s Atelier Lyrique.)