FringeReview UK 2026
The Playboy of the Western World
National Theatre, London
Genre: classical, Comedy, Drama, European Theatre, Feminist Theatre, International, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre
Venue: National Theatre, Lyttelton
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Directed by Caitríona McLaughlin, the Abbey’s current artistic director (since 2021) Playboy of the Western World runs at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton till February 28.
An impossible balance, but having seen Playboy at farce-speed, it’s good to weigh in with a loquacious backbeat of despair. Wholly absorbing.
Review
There’s a subversion deeper than outraged audience members knew, brawling over John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey Theatre Dublin in January 1907. Not that someone might have imposter syndrome, or fake it till they make it; but that someone can become what people think them. It’s transactional and social. So when a young man blunders in, in more distress than braggadocio claiming he’s murdered his father, the outrage was first that (to the man’s surprise) women mob him and men lionize him. And that he becomes what they claim, when he’s put to the test to repeat his action. Directed by Caitríona McLaughlin, the Abbey’s current artistic director (since 2021) Playboy of the Western World runs at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton till February 28.
Though the play’s ostensible theme turns on apparent patricide, the women take both exuberant centre-stage and have the tragic last words. In this, as elsewhere, Synge was always ahead of his time, centring the plight and limited choices of women. Though nearly betrothed to a second cousin, Nicola Coughlin’s spirited barmaid Pegeen Mike falls hard for Christy Mahon (Éanna Hardwicke), as a blindsided, mutedly bitter Shawn Keogh (Marty Rea, slightly less hapless than some) looks on. There’s competition though in Widow Quinn (Siobhán McSweeney), more sexually explicit, more experienced and able to turn a rebuff to a bargain when she senses she’s out-charmed. Though Christy muses when alone “two fine women”, placing them on an equal footling, it’s clear he’s fallen too.
In Coughlin’s hands Pegeen’s desires are direct, ardent not merely sexual. The suddenness of Christy’s world punches possibility through drab marriage. Whereas McSweeney’s Quinn is disinhibited but realises after a tussle and a bit of blackmail, she’ll have to settle for an informed celibacy, where Christy is bound to her for keeping his secrets. She too is frustrated, and resigns her part with some finality, some time before Coughlin’s last line, thrown up after defiantly slapping one person, into keening. It can be played for laughs, or might engender laughter. Not here: light thickens and darkens.
Hardwicke’s Christy is not just frightened and small-voiced on his entrance. He’s clearly suffering from some PTSD. There’s a careful realism investing states of mind. But Synge’s directions and world are never overstepped. Hardwicke’s Christy grows cubits and at a crucial moment, absolutely the man caried in can shrink at a confrontation with his past. But then something ha shifted. There’s a fluid mix of blank trauma to start with, and his apex a roaring boy never fully banishes it. There’s a still a blank stare and it seems intentional. Hardwicke never quite convinces us that a whole community would lionize him, in this deliberately haunted reading: that may be the point. The community’s desperate to believe in someone.
Lorcan Cranitch’s landlord Michael Flaherty is a study in blather, rising up as if from a genre painting and etching his way across his daughters life like a long scratch. The younger regulars like Jimmy Farrell (Nooise Dunbar) and Philly Cullen (Matthew Forrest) are happiest when ragging or pursuing Christy: their whoops or skirls of fury are comical but skitter across the often lowering backdrop to lend it on occasion much-needed energy. That’s amplified by Susan Akintomide, Peter Mooney, Donncha O’Dea. Then the lowering power of Declan Conlon’s Old Mahon: there’s a glint and granite to him, a danger that makes you believe he might have at Christy’s age been all the community wanted and more. Including his bullying.
Likewise there’s bright work from Marty Breen as Sara Tansey, leader of the young women, lusting but somehow invested in seeing one of their own happy; Susan Bray (Megan Cusack), Nelly (Sallay Garnett) Honor Blake (Fionnuala Gygax) all have individual lines that flicker and go as they light up like benign Bacchantes.
This three-act play runs two hours thirty-five, and takes some while to gather pace. That’s partly as it’s meticulous in observing Synge’s inflections, with Patricia Logue’s dialect coaching reminding us that Synge was a London-and-Leipzig-trained violinist. The thick-paid poetry and cadent saws of Synge are quite magical, sometimes heard to great effect in sparer pays like the earlier Riders to the Sea. Here as the comedy intensifies through Act Two, both speed and a sharper clarity make you forget the ruminant start. Lines like a man’s “whole skin needs washing like a Wicklow sheep” are replaced by hard-edged dialogue as the skeltering farce of Act Three lights a fuse. The physical comedy points forward to later in the century. As always with Synge, it’s material things like boards, and cloth that embody the imagistic force of his poetry. Even in a prose comedy such as this. As aural analogues, ‘Wrens’ or straw-clad payers stalk upstage and transgress like small banshees of the mind. Twice curtains of rain fall.
Certainly Synge’s poetry and tragedy seep through the damp and the mummers, as if somehow referencing Conor McPherson’s world too. So the comedy’s muted, as if McLaughlin wants its full amplitude and potential as the great Irish play to rival Eugene O’Neill. Some exuberance is lost, but the poetry stays.
That’s underscored by Katie Davenport’ meticulously researched and sourced costumes and tilted set. Mostly back-lit by James Farncombe, it’s haunted by Anna Mullarkey’s violin music, and Adrienne Quartley’s eerie-voiced and raspy sound, redolent of cows.
Back-lit is perhaps the overall feel of the play, Synge’s starker poetry from earlier work, and invoking the hopeless stasis of the community. But Synge was forward-looking too, particularly in his comic energy. It’s an impossible balance, but having seen Playboy at farce-speed, it’s good to weigh in with a loquacious backbeat of despair. Wholly absorbing.
Movement Director Sue Mythen, Fight Director Kev McCurdy, Casting Directors Alastair Coomer CDG, Naomi Downham CDG, Dialect Coach Patricia Logue, Voice Coach Shereen Ibrahim, Staff Director Neetu Singh
Producer Debbie Farquhar, Production Manager Ben Arkell, CSM Ian Farmery, DSM Jo Nield, ASMs Aida Bourdis and Ian Connop, DSM Cover Aimee woods, ASM Cover Ophir Westman, Deputy Production Manager Phil Connolly, Project Draughting Tom Atkinson and Nathan James Digital Art Daniel Radley-Bennett, Costume supervisor Natasha Prynne.
