The Playboy Of The Western World – Lyttelton National Theatre
The Playboy Of The Western World triggered mass brawls when it premiered in Dublin in 1907. Theatregoers took violent exception – literally – to author JM Synge’s uncouth characterisation of rural Ireland.
Nowadays, its reputation often exceeds its reality – and not even the talents of Nicola Coughlan and Siobhan McSweeney, from TV’s Derry Girls, look likely to spark civil unrest on London’s genteel Southbank.
The lead role falls to lesser-known Irish actor Eanna Hardwicke, who plays Christy Mahon: a vagrant braggart who rolls up in a Mayo bar, run by Coughlan’s Pegeen, and claims to have killed his father with a potato spade.
This bestows instant celebrity on Christy – and gives Pegeen the chance to escape betrothal to last–farmer–on–the–shelf Shawn (Marty Rea).
But not before McSweeney’s merry Widow Quin has had a crack the at the young outlaw herself. ‘There’s great temptation in a man who did kill his Da,’ she sighs.
It all goes turf–shaped when Christy’s father (Declan Conlon) turns up alive but not well.
It’s a terrific rowdy set-up, but the ratio of blether to action – over nigh-on three hours – can be challenging; not least because it’s written in a dense, rustic, ‘Hibern-English’ dialect. There’s plenty of conversational horse trading, a fair bit of potcheen gets drunk.
Director Caitriona McLaughlin, from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre (where the play first created a storm), has added a roaming chorus of wailing mummers in an attempt to create a carnival mood of misrule.
Unfortunately, it’s exactly that spirit of misrule that’s missing from this sluggish production. On the theatrical prairie of the National’s Lyttelton’s stage, it feels like a minor altercation in a distant field.
Nor does the sexual rivalry between Coughlan’s Pegeen and McSweeney’s Widow Quin threaten to blow wigs off.
They need to be much brassier and bawdier to stand any chance of inciting London’s theatregoers to lamp one another.
It is running until February 28.
