The Playboy of the Western World

It is Synge’s full-length masterpiece. Treated as a weakling by his overbearing father, Christy Mahon strikes his father down in a rage. Christy runs off to County Mayo, where he relates his troubles to a publican and his attractive daughter Pegeen, who shelter him. He becomes a hero to Pegeen and the community. When his father arrives, Christy once more attempts to „kill” him. Then all turn against him, even Pegeen, though it breaks her heart. But when the subdued father returns on his hands and knees „to be killed fo the third time” as Christy puts it, the playboy is in complete control ready to go „romancing through a romping lifetime – to the dawning of the judgement day.” Yet the picture of Irish life caused riots at the Abbey Theatre when it first appeared. Although the play has some elements of historic fact, it is another example of mythic tale. Below the level of the plot, it is about three interacting illusions. Christy enters a dream world of his own: he is Don Quixote figure, a savior-fool, hero-clown, and visionary-madman. Although he starts as a scared boy, his inner fiction creates a massive illusion, the bubble of which is pricked by the arrival of his father. The villagers create a world where Christy is a hero. And Pegeen falls in love with a hero she has created in her mind, dreaming of going off with him into a world far from that of reality; at the end she has a real sense of loss, the „only playboy of the western world” is gone. When Christy „kills” his father for a second time, the villagers view him with horror, and he is both beaten and betrayed. Despite the comedy throughout, the end reveals that the characters originally thought endearing are, in reality, ignorant and treacherous.