Author : DESY, LUSIA

John Millington Synge?s The Playboy of The Western World is about a young man who is able to develop himself to be a mature man after going through some experiences. Christy Mahon, the main male character, experiences emotional development that finally makes him become a `new? person. The thesis writer is going to analyze how Christy Mahon?s experiences lead him into maturity. This study attempts to prove that there are some steps of emotional development that are experienced by Christy Mahon. In analyzing her topic, the thesis writer uses literary approach with some literary tools, such as characterization, setting, and conflict. Besides that, she also uses psychological concept of emotional development, fear, denial, and maturity to analyze Christy Mahon?s emotional changes. Christy Mahon experiences emotional changes after he thinks that he has just killed his father. He is changINg from a frightened person into a person who is proud of himself because of the villagers? admiration of what he has done. But then, his pride turns to denial when he finds out that his father is still alive. Finally, the denial turns into acceptence when he realizes that he has to accept the reality. Christy Mahon?s acceptance makes him become a `new? person that shows that he has also developed from a frightened person to a mature man.

Keyword : english, drama, synge, john, millington, irish, emotional, christy, mahon

Sumber : http://repository.petra.ac.id/2798/

Tusen takk til søstrene konglemos! De la ut denne siste videoen av Lady GaGa på faceen og jeg er HEKTET!!

Jeg har alltid hatt en hat/elsk forhld til frøken GaGa, eller rettere sagt en BAD ROMANCE.. høhø..

Aldri før har jeg hatt lyst å sprette opp og danse rundt i undertøy med store glorete smykker som nå! Og man har lov å danse MEEINIÆKKH! ohlala!  ja jeg er virkelig caught in a bad romance.. igjen..

SÅH! la oss alle synge! Rah-rah ah-ah-ah! Ro mah ro-mah-mah! GaGa Oo-la-la! Want your bad romance!

<3

I’ve been listening to a couple of English operas the past few days (and went to see the ROH double bill of L’Heure Espagnol and Gianni Schicchi) and it’s all got me thinking about the libretto of an opera and where it comes from.

The English operas are Vaughan Williams’ Riders to the Sea and (after a lot of recent twitter action about Opera Australia’s production) Britten’s Peter Grimes. Two different approaches to source texts you couldn’t find – Vaughan Williams pretty much sets the text of Synge’s one act play as he found it, whilst Montagu Slater, in his libretto for Grimes, takes a section of a larger poem and turns it into a new work in its own right. Grimes is an out and out sadist in Crabbe’s original poem, yet Slater and Britten blur the edges between what Grimes has done and how he’s treated to the point where a good performance can floor you with the tragedy of it all.

This made me think of Gianni Schicchi, which I saw at Covent Garden the week before last. Here we have a work expertly crafted (by Giovacchino Forzano) from a handful of lines taken from a much larger work (Dante’s Inferno). Forzano takes Schicchi, a minor character given a passing mention, and explores his story in full. We all know there’s great skill in taking a source text ad adapting it so it works dramatically when sung. It’s a completely different thing though to take a fragment of something and work it into a full-scale masterpiece in its own right, creating a dramatic structure and singable text as you go.

All of this has given me a new-found respect for the art of the librettist and convinced me of the worth of reading the source materials an opera came from, not necessarily to enhance my understanding of the opera itself (if the libretto works it should stand alone), but just to see the craft that goes into preparing a text to be sung and acted in the unique form that is opera. I’m sure this is a stage many of you have already been through in your journey through opera but, for a relative newcomer like me, it opened my eyes further and reminded me that one of the reasons I love opera so much is the sheer number of angles you can approach it from.

OK, back to writing content for the website – must add a list of librettists to the ever-growing phase 2 content list!

Matt

I går var det bursdagfeiring.. Bare 2 mnd på etterskudd.. Men bedre sent enn aldri! Mange mennesker, masse liv, en haug med søling, litt gulvvask, et tårn med brownies, noe glassknusing, et tryn, en haug med muffind, mye drikking, høylytt synging, kreativ dansing, en sovnet, med andre ord.. EN PERFEKT KVELD! et lite utvalg random bilder…

STOOOOOR pakke

Cathrine, InaLille og Natalie <3

Erlend og Bård

Søte Vibeke <3

Cathrine og vår nye venn B.O.B.

Sååååå glad i Erlend <3

Victor, Ferdinand og rolf var klart de kuleste

Jeg og Mad har gjort et desperat forsøk på å videoblogge, og jeg merker vi har større talenter på lur enn akkurat dette.

Og ja, jeg skal trekke vinneren av konkurransen snart:)

On November 21, 1906, Sir Horace Plunkett was in London, testifying for the third straight day before the Royal Commission on Congested Districts in Ireland.  Although he had been a Unionist earlier in his career, Plunkett’s advocacy of co-operativism and social reform had allowed him to be viewed as a potentially moderate nationalist leader in the late 1890s, until his support for the Boer War alienated more ‘advanced’ nationalists like Maude Gonne and Arthur Griffith (Foster, W.B. Yeats, 240).  Plunkett’s Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS) provided an important model for the Abbey Theatre of an influential cultural institution which could make simultaneous claims to be noncommercial, nonpolitical, and socially responsible (see Mathews, Revival; Foster, W.B. Yeats, 322-23).  George Russell had taken over editorship of the IAOS’s weekly journal, the Irish Homestead, the year before and immediately began filling out the organization’s economic policies with a vision of a new art and literature emerging out of rural co-operativism (Allen, George Russell, 27-35).  Plunkett, testifying before the commission, likewise recommended a program blending economic and cultural self-improvement.

“The special objects would be education, industrial development, improving the live stock,” Plunkett said, “but mainly education in the broad sense, and in the long run education is the great point” (Irish Times, 21 Nov., 1906; 10).  Plunkett hoped this would allow as much labor and authority as possible to devolve to local councils.  The Congested Districts Board (CDB) would be left only with a vague charge for teaching “domestic economy” and that through Parish Committees.  Plunkett was well aware that the CDB’s association with constructive unionism and its centralized planning were unpopular.  According to the Times,

Sir Horace said he did not think that the work of the Congested Districts Board had been lost, but the time had come for reconsideration [...] it had, to some extent, been working along the wrong lines.  But if there were a change in Irish economic thought–and there was a growing feeling in favour of voluntary and private enterprise–he thought the Congested Districts Board was no longer fitted to carry on the work.  (10)

Plunkett politely received suggestions from the Commission about developing game farms and reviving the glove industry, but mainly argued that the overlap between the CDB and the Agricultural Board was “very disadvantageous”: “There could be no Chinese wall round the congested districts, and, that being so, the result of duality was obviously embarrassing” (10).  For Plunkett, the unneccesarily doubled bureaucracy was a sign of inappropriate, arbitrary divisions–an imaginary “Chinese wall”–which more modern governance should dissolve.

If Plunkett’s specific proposals in some ways fit the spirit of Synge’s subtle complaints in his impressions of the Congested Districts, the assimilationist logic he used to arrive at those proposals was also what had led him to endorse the Boer war.  Developing industries (game, gloves) which could be integrated into major metropolitan markets was crucial for lifting these areas out of poverty without mass emigration, but it also imagined the future of these areas wholly in terms of their absorption into a global or imperial economy.  There were at least two ways to imagine the role of education in this coming modernity.  Russell would put it in Whitmanesque terms: “In the democracy of the future every man must be his own duke” (quoted in Allen, 30).  Synge’s reports presented a bleaker scene:

I asked him about the fishing in the neighborhood we were in.  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘there’s little fishing in it at all, for we have no good boats.  There is no one asking for boats for this place, for the shopkeepers would rather have people idle, so that they can get them for a shilling a day to go out in their old hookers and sell turf in Aran and on the coast of Clare’ (Travelling Ireland, 44).

I dag har jeg hatt besøk av min lillesøster, R3n3t. Vi har øvd på denne nydelige sangen sammen:) I morgen skal vi synge i en vielse, blir moro det:)

By 1908, Annie Horniman had shifted her interest to Manchester, but, through the threat of withdrawing her subsidy, she still shaped many of the productions of the NTS.  “If she could not make it into an international art theatre,” writes Adrian Frazier, “she could at least still prevent it from becoming a full-fledged Irish national theatre, either by planting self-censorship in the minds of the directors, censoring the NTS activities herself, or seizing upon a pretext to close the Abbey” (Behind the Scenes, 207).

Frazier quotes Yeats writing to Synge to show the way Horniman had been able to set the priorities for the company:  “There is a remote chance of money coming to us from some other quarter at the end of the patent period and that chance would be much better if we made ourselves a representative Irish institution” (Saddlemyer, Theatre Business, 235; quoted in Frazier, 204).  Their efforts to become more “representative” were further helped by Horniman’s exclusion of other, more avowedly nationalist, companies from the Abbey.  Horniman refused the National Players Society outright on the grounds of its affiliation with the Gaelic League and, at least in part, because it had “national” in its name.  She likewise barred the Theatre of Ireland group after an advertisement mentioned they were “members of the Abbey theatre company” (Frazier, 222-224).

On the eve of the Fays formally resigning from the company, Synge wrote that he was “still in favour of some democratic method with the company” and that he agreed with a former manager that “discipline would never be got in the Abbey unless we organise the public spirit of the company” (Theatre Business, 271).  “[C]oercion has never been a success in Ireland,” Synge continued, “I see no reason why we should not have a spirit of co-operation between ourselves and the company” (271).  Synge’s pragmatic approach was successful in avoiding the dismissal or resignation of the whole company, and resembled, at least in its rhetoric, the more democratic structures of the amateur companies Horniman had rejected.  Yeats, on the other hand, regarded the resignations as an opportunity; Roy Foster writes that the quarrels with the Fays had become “one more landmark struggle in the drama of his life, with Willie Fay playing the part of MacGregor Mathers, and the Abbey’s integrity representing the ark of the Order of the Golden Dawn” (W.B. Yeats, 380).  For Yeats, the creation of a “representative Irish institution” had much less to do with a “spirit of co-operation” (in either the purely rhetorical or popular political collectivist senses) than with the chance to forge a new theatrical aesthetic, worthy of Ireland.  Foster also notes that around the same time, Mrs. Patrick Campbell (who was also in the middle of the “Lyttleton affair” that had further incensed Horniman) was inspiring Yeats to begin The Player Queen as a medium for her talents: “when I saw her in the Modern Plays she was doing here I told her that she was a volcano cooking eggs” (380).  That summer, Yeats complained about Augustus John’s portrait also with reference to “Modern Plays”: “[John's] work is an expression, as are Ibsen’s plays, of the school opposed to everything I care for or try to accomplish myself” (Theatre Business, n. 1, 259).

What Yeats takes from Synge’s work is something different.  Terence Brown describes how in Discoveries Yeats works out the implications of his intense engagement with theater and theatricality.  Although “theatre business” famously constrained the colt of his imagination, Yeats gradually came to the conclusion that “what moves natural men in the arts is what moves them in life, and that is, intensity of personal life, intonations that show them, in a book or play, the strength, the essential moment of a man who would be exciting in the market or at the dispensary door” (quoted in Brown, The Life of W.B. Yeats, 165).  Yeats’s emphasis on the “moment” and the quality of “intonation” here sounds similar to formulations from earlier in his career, but, as Brown notes, Yeats is deliberately abandoning an aesthetic of unmoving states and essential selves: “[Yeats] had come indeed to accept the complex, mutable compound which is selfhood, which achieves wholeness of being only when it expresses itself in moments of passion” (Brown, 166).  Whereas Synge had increasingly begun to connect passionate displays of emotion with the material and economic horizons in which they took place (even if to explore why these displays were “bad” or out of place), Yeats turned theatricality into a new dimension of public space, purified of solid states and available for experimental new conjunctions of rhythm and affect which, for all their seeming anachronism, appealed to the future for their authority.  “I dream that I have brought / To such a pitch my thought / That coming time can say / ‘He shadowed in a glass / What thing her body was” (Poetry, Drama, and Prose, 36).

One way of reading Yeats’s subsequent attention to spiritualism and mediumship (the “obsession” Brown argues The Green Helmet strongly anticipates; 188) is as a search for forms of reception in which authenticity or authority is deferred with the promise of certain proof in the future.  Martin Puchner has argued that the manifesto form is a key genre of the various modernist movements, and Yeats’s post-Synge understanding of theatricality would fit Puchner’s model of utterances making performative claims but having theatrical forms because their authorizing conditions are always posed as existing perfectly only in the future (Poetry of the Revolution, 25, 72).   To assess how this manifesto form of theatricality took shape differently in Synge and Yeats, and thus to read their work as complex responses to the emerging new political articulations of national public spaces,  we can compare the way two short lyric poems, “Dread” and “The Mask,”  depict the movement of affective attachment from one object to another.

I mentioned in an earlier post that Saturday afternoon brought rain. Saturday evening brought gale force winds, howling past my window and shaking my front door til I thought it might actually swing open. The storm didn’t bother me, really, until I woke up around 6 and it was still going strong. The weather had to get better! I thought. It just had to! We were headed to the Aran Islands at 9 and I was worried the ferries wouldn’t run in the terrible conditions.

Worrying about the weather, it turns out, was silly. Sure, the boat ride was a bit more like the Millenium Force than the Junior Gemini, but by the time we reached Inis Mor, the largest of the Aran Islands, we saw nothing but blue sky.

Worrying about the weather off the Aran Islands is never actually that silly. Historically, the islanders made a living through fishing and farming, two occupations entirely dependent on the weather, and the seas around the Aran Islands are notorious for deadly storms. John Millington Synge wrote a play, Riders to the Sea (1904), about a woman from the Aran Islands who lost her husband and six sons in fishing and other water accidents. The people of Inis Mor, Inis Meainn, and Inis Oirr are also farmers. They raise cattle and grow crops, each field and pasture seperated by rock fences.

While on our trip to Inis Mor, I heard a fellow tourist ask his friend, “Where’d they get all the rock for the fences?”

I couldn’t see the friend’s face – they were sitting behind me – , but I like to imagine his eyes were twinkling with mischief instead of simply blank with confusion when he responded, “Rock trees.”

“Oh,” said the first. “That makes sense. Or maybe there’s a bigger rock wall that they chip smaller rocks from.”

Now rock trees can only be found growing next to money trees, and they haven’t been seen in Ireland since the days when wealthy landlords owned practically all the land. The idea of “a bigger rock wall” is closer to the true origin of the rocks all over the Aran Islands. Due to geological reasons which I can’t claim to understand, the soil of the Aran Islands is very thin, often just a bit of dirt between layers of rock. Basically, the islands are the tops of mountains, just sticking out of the sea. As a result, much (though not all) of the land looks something like this:

Not exactly ideal farming soil. The farmers of western Ireland, however, break down the rocky soil by fertilizing it with seaweed. (In the movie Far and Away, Tom Cruise is carrying seaweed up from the shore to his field during the opening scene. The scene was shot, incidentally, in the Dingle Peninsula!) The largest rocks are used to build walls between fields; the smaller rocks eventually break down into arable ground with the aid of seaweed fertilizer. The beautiful green fields and pastures, each divided by a rock wall that holds together, even without mortar, serve as amazing testaments to the hard work and dedication of the islanders.

Of course, the labyrinth of walls hasn’t been the only way islanders have used their abundance of rock. People have been farming and fishing on the Aran Islands for thousands of years, using the rocks to build houses and fortifications. We visited Dun Aonghasa, a prehistoric fort on the western edge of Inis Mor. The fort is surrounded by not one, not two, but three thick rock walls on three sides and a 80+ meter drop on the remaining western edge.

For added protection, the builders of this magnificent fort also thought to include large rock spikes between the second and third wall. These spikes, called “chevaux de frise” (or, I think, “horses of the Frisians”) are razor sharp and, as our tour guide reminded us, “anything but comfortable when it’s a cold night and raining and you’re trying to make it to a wall where a guard’s probably standing with a spear waiting to kill you.”

Fortunately, I made it through the walls and chevaux de frise alive. The danger was worth it: the view from inside the fort is absolutely unbelieveable. One can look to the north or south and see the cliff edge of the island, or east back over the fields toward Galway, or west, where the next large body of land is Canada. The brave tourist (myself included!) can army crawl to the very edge of the cliff, to where the rock is cut naturally at a 90 degree angle, and look down at the roaring ocean over 80 meters below. I was a bit worried for the huge group of teenagers goofing around right near the cliff, but our tour guide didn’t seem nervous; he helped stage a few pictures of tourists “falling” off the edge while he pulled them back up.

“The poetry of exaltation will be always the highest,” writes Synge, “but when men lose their poetic feeling for ordinary life, and cannot write poetry of ordinary things, their exalted poetry is likely to lose its strength of exaltation, in the way men cease to build beautiful churches when they have lost happiness in building shops” (Complete Works, 433).  It is easy to read this sentence from the preface to Synge’s posthumously published poetry as an endorsement of Yeats’s more famous theories.  In fact, Synge’s terse formulations are often transformed by what Roy Foster calls Yeats’s “half-envious, half-affectionate view of the younger playwright” and read in relation to the sound of the “Synge-like voice [that] emerged in the Crazy Jane poems” or in Purgatory–rather than in relation to Synge’s voice itself (“Yeats, Synge, and Anglo-Irish Etiquette,” in Grene, Interpreting Synge, 54).  Especially considering how often Yeats framed himself as working from the same models as Synge, the Synge-like qualities of Yeats’s verse might be described as simulations, not imitations.  What quality was Yeats simulating, and how did it distort the work it was working from?

In “Poetry and Tradition,” also published in 1908, Yeats formulated his own theory of the threats to “exalted poetry.”  Characteristically more vivid and more prolix than Synge, Yeats locates the exaltations he has in mind historically and suggests that modernity needs to turn or recoil from its present path.

If we would find a company of our own way of thinking, we must go backward to turreted walls, to courts, to high rocky places, to little walled towns, to jesters like that jester of Charles the Fifth who made mirth out of his own death; to the Duke Guidobaldo in his sickness, or Duke Frederick in his strength, to all those who understood that life is not lived at all, if not lived for contemplation or excitement (Poetry, Drama, and Prose, 282).

What Synge articulates as a diffuse conditional (“when men lose their poetic feeling”), Yeats imagines as a series of clearly absent authorities.  Where Synge emphasizes the impact of changes in literary genre, Yeats emphasizes changes in perceptual and affective capacity:  courtly play demonstrates mastery and “minds clear enough for strength” and the spectacle of “ennobled death” allows the expression of “brief sorrow” over humanity’s existential situation, the recognition of which is usually “too great for the eye of man” (282).  These capacities, which had been available in the “high rocky places” and courts of Renaissance Italy, are inherently linked to a freedom from certain affective displays: “That we may be free from all the rest, sullen anger, solemn virtue, calculating anxiety, gloomy suspicion, prevaricating hope, we should be reborn in gaiety” (282).  In Yeats’s account, the presence of an authority like Duke Guidobaldo would eliminate all the degrading negative qualifications (sullen, solemn, calculating, gloomy, prevaricating) imposed on modern emotional expression.  In his journals, Yeats goes even further, suggesting that certain negative emotions can be eliminated altogether:  “For without culture or holiness, which is always the gift of a very few, a man may renounce wealth or any other external thing but he cannot renounce hatred, envy, jealousy, revenge.  Culture is the sanctity of the intellect” (252).  Renouncing both wealth and the accompanying affects it engenders requires a source of “inherited culture” beyond the individual artist, whom Yeats puts “in the category of the clerk” and imagines in the paradoxical situation of being sufficiently moved by the “hysterica passio of Ireland” but unable to sanctify his work with anything more than a merely “personal renunciation” (252).

Returning to Synge’s preface, we can see how Synge’s approach to language is shaped by musical, rather than visual, metaphors and how his focus stays on the reception, rather than the creation, of poetic language.

Many of the older poets, such as Villon and Herrick and Burns, used the whole of their personal life as material, and the verse written in this way was read by strong men, and thieves, and deacons, not by little cliques only.  Then, in the town writing of the eighteenth century, ordinary life was put into verse that was not poetry, and when poetry came back with Coleridge and Shelley it went into verse that was not always human. [...] In these days poetry is usually a flower of evil or good; but it is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms (Complete Works, 433).

Yeats poses the modern loss of poetic sensibility against an image of an ancient, idealized court, but Synge compares various threats to the reception of poetry and famously suggests that, for the moment, “it may almost be said that before a verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal” (433).  For Synge, the loss of a “poetic feeling for ordinary life” has as much to do with the availability of modern art as it does with its production.  The “timber” of poetic language has to be connected to the social horizon of building shops (almost) before it can be connected to the social horizon of building churches.  Despite Synge’s remarks on Ibsen in the preface to Playboy, the dynamic Synge isolates here between secular and religious architectures recasts the main tension of Ibsen’s The Master Builder.  Synge’s hesitation about poetry having to become brutal parallels Solness’s ultimately tragic temptation by Hilda’s vision:

SOLNESS.  No, I don’t build any church towers now.  Nor churches either.

HILDA.  What do you build then?

SOLNESS.  Homes for human beings.

HILDA (reflectively).  Couldn’t you put a small–a small church tower up over the homes as well?

SOLNESS (with a start).  What do you mean by that? (Complete Major Prose Plays, trans. Fjelde, 810).

Ibsen draws attention to the fact that Hilda’s language is what captivates Solness; the master builder takes their overlapping imagery as a sign of an impersonal force or destiny working through him.  (Although I don’t have the space to work through the parallels here, Solness’s use of folk figures–trolls and castles in air–can be read as just the sort of evidence Yeats turns to in search of an “inherited culture” which will nonetheless justify his creation of new, modern forms.)   It is in the face of such threats that Synge has to insist on “roots among the clay and the worms” and on poetry “learn[ing] to be brutal.”

There is a genre that is faster to read than a novel and longer than a Shakespearian Sonnet–The Play Is the Thing.  Often overlooked and underappreciated as a reading text outside the theater, still, plays offer some of the most engaging dialouge and delightful language around. And if you’ve got a game companion, they’re ideal for sharing. 

Not for the faint of heart:

John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi–the duchess has a secret lover–or is it a secret hubby?

Ben Johnson’s Volpone or the Fox–con men, lust, and law and order!

Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl—and A Chaste Maide in Cheapside is also delightful for the coffin scene especially. The Girl—quite the equal opportunity desirer. Chaste Maide—more FUN than Romeo and Juliet–the lovers die—or do they?

Shakespeare’s King Lear—ah, all the dysfunctional family values one could wish for..

Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good—and lest I be remiss–For the Love of the Nightingale.  First, how Australia was populated by so called criminals. Second, what a man in lust will do…

Sam Sheppard’s True West—more family values–sort of–

Aristophane’s Lysistrata—Sex or War–chose your adventure.

Synge’s Playboy of the Western World–It’s a damn fine Irish play. What more need I say?

Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children–More War, anyone?

Goethe’s Faust—selling souls—ooohh see Michael Clayton’s cohorts..

Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second—all for love–truly.

Aphra Behn’s The Rover–lady snares a true troller among men–

~~~and what plays do you enjoy playing???

In “From Galway to Gorumna,” Synge’s account of the “external features” of a culture–which he closely connects to their economic conditions–quickly slides into a description of gestures, affects, and language.  As Synge approaches the village of Spiddal, which he calls a “borderland between the fairly prosperous districts in Galway and the barren country further to the west,”  he describes the houses and small ships coming into view as if he were looking for signs of life: “…none of the crews were to be seen, but threads of turf smoke [...] showed that men were probably on board (Complete Works, 190).  Having seen these signs, Synge describes the apparition of an old man and a young man with his characteristic blend of precise detail and mythological resonance: old man peered at them with “the inflamed eyes that are so common here from the continual itching of the turf-smoke,” while the young man had just “come down from a field of black earth” (190).  Unlike Moore’s “indications,” which clearly define a character’s inner state from the the perspective of the narrator (or viewer), the images of people Synge provides seem to make them less accessible.  Itching eyes and black earth differentiate the figures from the narrator even as they offer competing ways for the narrator or reader to interpret them, i.e. as products of their environment or eternal folk of the soil.  These details also provide the context for the gesture Synge makes the focus of the paragraph.  The young man asks the old man, “in Gaelic, to throw him a spark for his pipe” (190).  The old man  “disappeared for a moment, then came up again with a smouldering end of a turf sod in his hand and threw it up on the pier, where the young man caught it with a quick downward grab without burning himself, blew it into a blaze, lit his pipe with it and went back to work” (190-191).  Synge then explains the practice as a function of their poverty (they cannot afford matches), but also hints at the way it fits into a wider pattern of complex and interesting behavior: “the spark of lighting turf is kept alive day and night on the hearth, and when a man goes out fishing or to work in the fields he usually carries a lighted sod with him and keeps it all day buried in ashes or any dry rubbish, so that he can use it when he needs it” (191).  These are practices Synge feels he needs to explain to his readers in the Manchester Guardian since they are material differences which generate the mythologies urban readers (and often Synge himself) want to impose.  Yet if the “quick downward grab” of the young man suggests a natural way of being in harmony with the environment, of being at home in a world of turf-sod sparks and black earth, Synge immediately shows how these picturesque gestures can be absorbed into a nascent tourist economy.  Still within the same paragraph which had begun with the faint signs of inhabitation, Synge relates how an old woman begged from him in English and, when Synge replied in Irish “to show I knew her own language if she chose to use it,” gave him an even more “extraordinary profusion” of thanks and blessings (191).  ” ‘That the blessing of God may be on you,’ she said, ‘on road and on ridgeway, on sea and on land, on flood and on mountain, in all the kingdoms of the world’–and so on, till I was too far off to hear what she was saying” (191).  Synge doesn’t say if these blessings were in Irish or English, but the image of him moving away from a profusion of language–after having approached in the quiet evening–offers a subtle clue about the sorts of language he is interested in documenting.  Aspects of language connected to concrete gestures and a differentiated mode of life?  Yes.  Lingusitic turns of phrase offered as an exchange, poetry for halfpence?  No.

After dispelling a “first feeling” of romantic primitivism (wishing no reform would ever touch the West), Synge begins his first article for about the Congested Districts in the Manchester Guardian by laying out the tension the rest of his work will investigate in one way or another: “nearly all the characteristics which give colour and attractiveness to Irish life are bound up with a social condition that is near to penury” (Complete Works, 190).  Synge immediately makes it clear that this penury is not an enternal, necessary condition by contrasting it with his experiences of Brittany.  It’s worth observing how different this is from the aspects of the West and the Aran Islands which had attracted Symons and Yeats; Synge’s biographer notes that “The Savoy brought Verlaine, the Aran Islands, and Nietzsche before the English public as though this were a natural coalition in the face of pompous and brutal authority” (147).  Moore’s rough concept of painted “indications” hinted at more complex forms of representing Irish life, but, as with the symbolists, the conjunction of signs counted more than their relation to the signified or their function for an audience.  Synge is much less apt to extract cultural practices or signs from their historical context: in Brittany, “the best external features of the local life–the rich embroidered dresses, for instance, or the carved furniture–are connected with a decent and comfortable social position” (190).

After his first visit to Inishmaan in 1898, Synge wrote that “[o]n an island in the Atlantic, within a day’s journey from Dublin, there is still a people who live in conditions older than the Middle Ages, and have preserved in an extraordinary degree the charm of primitive man” (Travelling Ireland, 10).  Synge’s subsequent writing career depends on unravelling all the compact assumptions jammed into this sentence: the “charm” of the primitive, the possibility of “preserving” the past (in differing degrees), and the value of forms of life older than the Middle Ages. None of these assumptions survive his essays and plays with the romantic cast they have here, but his work becomes especially interesting when he–eventually–disturbs the conditions of the first two prepositional phrases as well. How is space perceived differently on the islands or in lonely rural glens? Why does that difference seem important when it’s “only a day’s journey from Dublin”? Where does the experience of modernity start to feel uneven?

It was any girl’s dream: young Molly Allgood, just 19 years old, an assistant at Switzer’s drapery, was about to make her debut on the Abbey stage. As she waited nervously in the wings, the stage manager called out, “beginners please”. And Molly dissolved in tears.

It was the conventional call for the actors to be ready, but Molly had never heard it before; she took it to be a jibe at her lack of experience.

But Molly impressed. Within a year, she was taking a lead role at the Abbey, in John Millington Synge’s ‘Riders to the Sea’, directed by the playwright. Synge was naturally shy, and had a reserve appropriate to his strict Puritan upbringing. But in the agreeable company of the Abbey players, he relaxed; an attraction grew between the writer and the young actress and, tentatively, a relationship. Synge initially sought to keep it private, fearing the hostility of his family and of his co-director at the Abbey, Lady Gregory.

“You must not mind if I seem a little distant at the Theatre,” he wrote to Molly. “Every one is watching us, and even when we are publicly engaged I do not care to let outsiders see anything.” (Synge’s letters have been edited in various volumes by Ann Saddlemyer.)

Diffident in public, he was furiously jealous in private. Molly was young, beautiful, and charismatic, fast becoming a star. She was surrounded by admirers and, it appears from his letters, perhaps not entirely disinclined to encourage them.

“For God’s sake,” he warned her, “keep clear of the men who dangle after actresses”. In another letter: “Of course you won’t go to Power’s dance, the thought would be ANGUISH to me!!”

On one occasion, after she had apparently stood him up, he wrote to her in an insomniac frenzy, at 4am: “I wish to God I had never been born.” On another, “I am almost frightened sometimes when I think how wildly I love you.”

Synge kept up a constant stream of love letters, with a frequency more suited to email: he often wrote to Molly just hours after they had parted, or sent her scraps of paper with notes written to her as updates during the same day, like an intimate blog. He called her “changling”, and signed off his letters, after the character in the play through which they first met, “your old Tramp”.

When he wrote in a temper, he often wrote again shortly after, apologising or explaining. “Don’t you know, changling, that I am an excitable, over-strung fool,” he wrote. “I am ashamed of my arid little letters when I have posted them, and of my foolish tempers, sometimes, when I bid you good-bye.”

It was a momentous time in Synge’s life, as it was in the Irish theatre. After a decade of incremental progress as a writer, ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ (with Molly playing the leading role of Pegeen Mike, which he had written for her) thrust him into the limelight in Ireland, and brought acclaim internationally.

The day after it opened, to near-riots, he wrote to Molly: “It is better any day to have the row we had last night, than to have your play fizzling out in half-hearted applause. Now we’ll be talked about. We’re an event in the history of the Irish stage.” He was a leader in a theatre that was at the vanguard of world drama. He was in love. And, though he didn’t know it, he was dying.

Synge had had his first operation ten years before, and had since suffered from repeated bouts of illness. Throughout 1907 and 1908, he and Molly planned for their wedding, but were thwarted by his ill health. In June 1907, he wrote that the doctor had advised him to “recover myself a bit before I get married”.

“It seems very hard to have to put off our wedding again, but it will only be I hope till the autumn or early winter.”

But they didn’t get married that autumn, or winter. In January 1908, he rented a flat in Rathmines, hoping to move Molly in once they were married. But in April, he fell very ill, and nearly died. He failed to regain his full health and, over the following months, he deteriorated.

By March 1909, he no longer had the energy to write, and had lost hope; Molly, in despair, tried to have a mass said for him, but was rebuffed by the priests she spoke to, for Synge was a Protestant.

On Wednesday March 24, one hundred years ago this week, John Millington Synge died. He was 37, and had been killed by the cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Molly maintained her career as a star of the Abbey, though she later married a theatre critic, which could be taken by some as an indication of misfortune.

In just six years, and six plays, Synge left an immense legacy, which is being celebrated in an exhibition of his manuscripts and photographs, just opened in the Long Room of Trinity College’s Library, and in Garry Hynes’s ongoing ‘DruidSynge’ project. (‘Playboy’ tours the UK in May and June, with some dates in Galway: see www.druid.ie.) He is a giant of the Irish theatre. He was also, though, the “old tramp” of a young girl called Molly. Therein lies the man that made the writer.

Written for my Irish Independent Saturday theatre column.

Ikveld skal jeg på medarbeiderfest i kirka. Fest for alle de som er med som frivillige medarbeidere, pluss at ‘koret’ skal synge. Siden pianisten vår har mye viktigere ting å gjøre, som alltid, må vi opptre uten ham, med meg som pianist. Jeg lurer litt på hvordan i all verden det skal gå. Det betyr at jeg ganske sikkert ikke klarer å synge samtidig, og det er da bare to kompetente sangere igjen. Hm. Håper ikke vi må si fra oss navnet amaSing. Ønsk oss lykke til da! 

Som er bandet mitt, hvis noen måtte lure. Vi er sånn jesusband/lovsangsband, ettellerannet, and we rock!

Vi spilte på en menighetsfest eller noe idag, og det gjorde vi godt. Biskopen var der og en mann som spilte orgel og greier, så egentlig skulle det ikke så mye til for å toppe det, men vi toppet alt vi. Tilogmed den eviggode glasuren på sjokoldekaka de hadde der. Vi fikk spørsmål om nye opptredener like etterpå, så vi må jo ha gjort noe rett.

Tok opp når vi spilte idag, men tror ikke jeg skal legge det ut, dere sier bare at vi ikke var så flinke som jeg påstår. Dere har feil.

u24/7 er best:

Charlotte, Susanne, Ørjan, Thorfinn, Torbjørn, Ken-Tore. ilu.
Litt feil folk på bildene, menmen. Kanskje jeg får noen andre senere.