Such Talk

The Playboy of the Western World.

A lonely public house perches on a dune above the wild coast of Mayo; a flute and pipes keen an eerie obbligato to the complaining of the surf. Into the tavern stumbles a tatterdemalion lad, and to the landlord's daughter he says: "I'd trouble you for a glass of porter, woman of the house. I'm destroyed walking."

This touches off the torrent of language, the beautiful cadences of the Irish tongue, that ripples and sometimes spews through John Millington Synge's 1907 comedy. Such talk has not been heard since the poets of the Dingle Bay, and it very nearly keeps this straightforward and modest little film version of Playboy out of trouble. But trouble there is. Siobhan McKenna, for all her gloriously peat boggy voice and her fine face with its mouth shaped like a shamrock leaf, is 20 years too old to be playing the fiery-tempered Pegeen opposite the likes of boyish Gary Raymond. A pity, too, for the magic goes well until a closeup breaks the spell.

Raymond plays Christy Mahon, the dreamy wanderer whose bloody tale of parricide bewitches every hearer on that lonely and scandal-starved strand. Pegeen clucks over him like a pullet, the Widow Quin sets traps for him, and a bevy--for there is no other word to describe these refugees from some amateurish Pirates of Penzance--of young girls pelt him with phony giggles and surfeit him with breakfasts of duck eggs, fine fat boiled hens, cakes, and pats of butter wrapped in cabbage leaves. Too many cooks can spoil a broth of a boy, and Christy's vanity spurs him on to further embroideries on how he killed his wicked old father. Then father appears--and Christy Mahon, the golden-tongued playboy of the western world, crumples into a cringing figure of contempt before all his fine new friends. But whisht! Christy-boy gets himself up, chases his old da outside, and with a whack of a loy, lays him low.

Synge's plot saves its surprises for the end. But what lingers behind is the recollection of all that brave, gorgeous language and one fine scene when Christy and Pegeen declare their love against a hillock of dune grass, with the dappling sunlight going dim and bright all the while behind the hurrying October clouds.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.