Old Play in Manhattan

The Playboy of the Western World (by John Millington Synge; produced by Theatre Inc.) remains, after 40 years, one of the fine things in the modern theater. What seems strange is that 40 years ago it should have been so furiously attacked. Yet the half-whimsical satire of Synge's folk comedy enraged Dublin's patriots as a stab at Ireland, and incensed her puritans by mentioning a woman's "shift."*A few years later, in Manhattan, explosive Irish Americans started a theater riot that ex-President Teddy Roosevelt, seated in a box, aborted by speaking up for the play.

Synge was, to be sure, having fun in The Playboy. He knew peasant Ireland, he knew both the folk capacity for hero worship and the folk craving to be a hero; a sophisticated romantic himself, he understood the primitive hunger for romance. Hence The Playboy is a whole series of fantastic, delicately mocking jokes and psychological touches.

When a timid young stranger flops down, "destroyed from walking," in a County Mayo pub and confesses that he has murdered his father in some far place, all the young women in the neighborhood find him superbly glamorous; indeed, the publican's daughter Pegeen is ready to throw over her commonplace swain to marry him. Fired by all this adulation, mousy Christopher Mahon (Burgess Meredith) begins to see himself as a lion, cops all the prizes in a sports contest, becomes a very chesty lad.

Then the "dead" father turns up, the mere bandaged victim of a whack on the head; and Christy sinks from a hero to a butt. To regain his stature, he tries to murder his "da" all over again; but to Pegeen, a dirty squabble in her own backyard is something quite unlike derring-do at a distance. She scorns to marry Christy; and he, now bossing his father as fiercely as his father once bossed him, sets off with the old man, from Ireland's "Western World," for home.

There is nothing at all great about The Playboy, or even particularly dramatic. But it is perhaps the best of modern folk comedies--a spanking travesty of the Irish "imagination" and a twinkling tribute to it.

Synge has overlaid his peasants' horseplay with his own warm Irish humor. He has taken the pungent speech in which they let themselves go, has both slyly overdresssed it and poetically beautified it, and given it matchless rhythm. The Playboy is something to hear even more than to see.

Last week's production was a pleasant one, though it did not catch all the music of the play, or even all the mirth. Actor Meredith's Christy was quite good at its best, but not all of a piece. Comedienne Mildred Natwick got the most liveliness into the play, but it was Dublin's Eithne Dunne--as Pegeen--who most caught The Playboy's spirit.

-A wag of the time suggested that thereafter scenes would have to be "chemisetted" instead of "sh-fted."

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