Flashback, January 1907: Synge’s ‘Playboy’ Causes Dublin Riot

At Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, the company’s initial good feelings about the reception of John Millington Synge’s new three-act comedy were rudely destroyed at its Saturday night premiere on January 26, 1907, when the audience took offense, midway through the play, to what one theatergoer called “an unusually brutally coarse remark.”

The line in The Playboy of the Western World that set off a week of rioting and debate came from young protagonist Christy Mahon, who, when told he could find other girls besides the one he loves, remarks: “It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only, and what’d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the Eastern World?”

One word in particular—"shifts,” an Irish expression for ladies’ undergarments— started the donnybrook. The company might have inadvertently heightened the impact of the remark, however, by substituting for “chosen females” the more geographically precise, but earthier, phrase, “Mayo females.”

At the end of the first act, Lady Augusta Gregory, one of the theater’s artistic directors, sent a telegram to her company partner, poet William Butler Yeats, who was lecturing in Scotland: “Play great success.” But by the curtain, she’d had to send another, acknowledging that the show had been “broken up” because of the offensive word.

Two nights later, Gregory, noting not just a packed house but one with an unusually high concentration of males in one section, correctly surmised that the disorder at the premiere was about to be repeated. She not only took the precaution of securing police protection, but also college athletes who might discourage the ruffians.

Neither tactic worked. In fact, the mob regarded the athletes as a challenge rather than an impediment to their mischief, and pummeled one of the would-be burly protectors to such an extent that he had to be carried out by one of the actors he was ostensibly guarding. From the moment the curtain rose, nearly 40 men, many equipped with tin trumpets, managed to make the play inaudible.

On Monday, February 4, Yeats--back in Dublin by this time, and having issued an invitation to debate the meaning of the play--told Abbey playgoers that the play demonstrated the rise of "a new thought, a new opinion, that we had long needed."

The reception for The Playboy of the Western World was nothing like that given at the Abbey to Synge’s Riders to the Sea, when the audience was so overwhelmed by the one-act tragedy they had just witnessed that they sat in stunned silence at the show’s conclusion.

Instead, Playboy brought to the fore internal tensions within the company, as well as the adversarial relationship that was developing between its prime movers— an overwhelmingly Protestant Irish group— and the larger Irish Catholic Dublin populace that, in its nationalist fervor, took quick offense against anything that remotely smacked of the hated stock “stage Irishman” character fostered by their longtime British overlords.

Many on that second, even more tumultuous Monday performance agreed with Joseph Holloway, a local architect who later claimed that, over 40 years, he had never missed an Abbey show. Synge, he wrote testily in his diary, possessed a “dungheap of a mind.” But he also recorded a dissent by another theatergoer, George Roberts, who said, “The play is the finest ever written if you had only the wit to see it!”

Contemporary critics and theatergoers are far more likely to side with Roberts, seeing Playboy of the Western World as a landmark in world drama, a truly original work that matched a hilarious plot twist (a cowardly youth who, mistakenly believing he’s killed his bullying father, becomes the hero of the countryside) with language that raised common peasant speech to levels of unexpected poetry and eloquence.

Time proved that Playboy of the Western World was one of the cornerstones of the Irish Literary Renaissance, a significant outpouring of talent and genius in a small land whose liberties had been traduced and language nearly destroyed by a colonial power. It became one of the best-known works of the Abbey, the first state-subsidized theater in the world.