Read Online Synge by Colm Tóibín - Free Book Online

Mick Lally’s Old Mahon was a hulking bear, Ray McBride’s Michael James an evasive ferret. Maeliosa Stafford’s Christy expanded and strutted as Sean McGinley’s Shawn Keogh shrank and lurked. And all this human variety created a shifting, unpredictable universe in which no simple chain of events could be traced from cause to effect. In the constant interplay of contrary moods and conflicting impulses, words were not just static poetry but gestures of continual self-invention. The language had restored to it the theatrical energy of people making themselves up through speech. The old question – how do I know what I think until I see what I say? – hovered over every line. Synge’s own paradoxical phrase for the kind of national mood that enables great art – ‘provisionally permanent’ – came to mind, capturing perfectly the fusion of a permanent text with a radically contingent performance that is the essence of theatre.
    Just as the 1982 Playboy drew on apparently unrelated productions like Island Protected By a Bridge of Glass , so it was continued in productions of other plays, most immediately the superb 1983 production of M.J. Molloy’s The Wood of the Whispering , again directed by Garry Hynes and again featuring Mick Lally, Sean McGinley, Maeliosa Stafford, Ray McBride and Marie Mullen, and the breathtaking 1985 premiere of Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire , with Mullen, Mary McEvoy and Siobhán McKenna. Each, of course, had its own dynamic, but each, too, reminded us that Druid’s Synge is not just about Synge. Bailegangaire is a wonderfully original masterpiece in its own right, yet the resonance of The Playboy could be felt in two ways. One, most obviously, was the language of Mommo’s story, a Gaelicized English that represented the fullest linguistic flowering in contemporary theatre of seeds that Synge had planted. The other was the absolute confidence with which that production approached the unusual structure of the play, in which the world of Mommo’s baroque narrative co-exists on stage with the more mundane reality of the contemporary action. It is hardly accidental that the split is, again, that between a gallous story and some dirty deeds, or that the brilliance of the production was rooted in Hynes’s evolution, through The Playboy , of a theatrical style precisely calibrated to just such a conflict between what we see and what we hear.
    If Druid’s Synge is about more than Synge, however, it has always seemed to me that it is also about another, curiously absent figure – Samuel Beckett. On the surface, this may seem a ridiculous suggestion. Beckett was an early presence in Druid’s repertoire: the company presented Act Without Words II in its very first season in the summer of 1975, and Happy Days the following year. But there have been just two Beckett productions since: Endgame in 1981 and Waiting for Godot in 1987. Yet it could be argued that there is so little of Beckett in Hynes’s repertoire for the same reason that there are, allegedly, no camels mentioned in the Koran: his is such a constant presence that there is no need to advertise it.
    This reticence, however, obscures something very significant. One of Garry Hynes’s great achievements has been, as it were, to reunite the two great theatrical scions of the Dublin Protestant professional class: Synge and Beckett. This process took hold in that production of The Wood of the Whispering , which imagined the play almost as if it were a collaboration between Synge and Beckett, the former’s lush, highly charged language spoken by the latter’s homeless, tragi-comic denizens of a fractured and indifferent universe. Beckett, in a sense, was drawn into Druid’s continuing quarrel with the romantic official notion of the ‘beautiful and tradition-rich places of the West’, an argument that has shaped the company’s history from its earliest days right up to and including its staging of Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy .