The Playboy of the Western World and Two Other Irish Plays

A murderer becomes the toast of the village as his charm negates his crime. A young countess saves her tenants from starvation, but only by selling her soul to the Devil. The sleepy parish of Nyadnanave sees a vision of a cockerel that dares the inhabitants to break the shackles of Church and State.

 

The plays that helped make modern Ireland

Riots greeted the first performance of The Playboy of the Western World at Dublin''s Abbey Theatre on 26 January 1907. Eggs, potatoes and even a slice of fruit cake were hurled at the actors during subsequent performances, and it seems unlikely that much of the actual play could have been heard in the uproar. Synge''s The Playboy of the Western World, with the two other plays in this volume, Yeats''s The Countess Cathleen (1892) and O''Casey''s Cock-a-doodle Dandy (1949), mark vital stages in the rich explosion of Irish drama that first made itself heard at the turn of the century and gathered momentum during the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Civil War.

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