Playboy of the Western World
You may have learned of Actors Equity’s disastrous ruling that prevented UCLA Live! from opening its seventh International Festival with the U.S. premiere of Barrie Kosky’s one-man rendition of The Tell Tale Heart. Although the piece is adapted from Poe’s tale by the performer himself, Equity ruled that his admission to our country would deprive an American actor of gainful employment. Presumably, the union is awaiting a homegrown adaptation that has yet to be written.
That unfortunate circumstance put the focus on the second international presentation on the docket: a set of plays taken from Druid Theatre Company’s 100th anniversary staging of the complete works of John Millington Synge. The bill, Synge’s first one-act, The Shadow of the Glen and his signature The Playboy of the Western World, presented a challenge that the producers handily solved by erroneously advertising Druid’s presentation as an evening of one-acts. In fact, Playboy is a full-bodied, three-act play that adequately fills almost two hours on its own. In a vain attempt to whittle down the 2 hr, 30 minute running time, audience members were requested not to leave the theatre between Shadow and Playboy, with the latter running for nearly two hours without an intermission.
Are you beginning to see the problem here? Only the most devoted of playgoers can be expected to sit still for so long. And on October 15th, the result was a steady attrition of the audience as the hours rolled by.
Another part of the problem was the steady drone in long arias of dialogue coming from the stage. Rumor has it that Druid’s project was to return authenticity to Synge’s work by playing down the slapstick that has grown up with each succeeding production of Playboy, and especially bring his poetic turns of phrase down to reality. But what was received with wild applause in New York City the year before quickly reached tedium in UCLA’s cavernous Freud Playhouse. Instead of an intimate cottage portrayed in Shadow, or a crowded country pub in Playboy, the faux rustic setting onstage depicted a two-story country backdrop towering above the action that had too few bodies to indicate the overcrowded environment that encouraged Playboy’s shifting mob responses. Such are the problems of a touring company. In fairness, the troupe has almost no control over the venues in which it plays, and those conditions can affect audience reception.
Perhaps the most damaging ingredient came from Druid’s purported effort to bring Synge’s words down to earth. Although it was the playwright’s own project to color his plays with lilting Irish idiom, many of the actors in the Druid company reached for a certain pitch in their longer speeches and stayed there, rendering them dirges, instead. Therefore, Nora (Catherine Walsh) retains a dark mood in her comic reply to her neighbor, Michael (Marcus Lamb) after he prematurely proposes to her. Played with super-realism, the comedic juxtaposition of Michael’s opportunism with Nora’s gloomy outlook on life gets lost.
There is more opportunity for diversity in the Druid’s production of Playboy. Sarah-Jane Drummey’s fiery, red-headed Pegeen Mike sparks the action, while Catherine Walsh serves up a more nuanced character as the Widow Quin. But the play belongs to “Christy” Mahon (Simon Boyle) as the Playboy, who takes his shifting fortunes for granted, and the joke, if it is to be found, is in his single-minded march through all of life’s vicissitudes, while all the other characters are knocking about around him. The action holds for the majority of play, yet falters on the home stretch in what should be the third act, when Christy tries to kill his father for the third time and wins the everlasting enmity of his once-adoring fans.
Most of us don’t know the reception Synge’s version of country life received when first produced. His work was viewed as that of an outsider whose observations about country folk and their quaint turns of phrase brought their absurdities back on themselves. Because Synge was a Protestant observing a Catholic peasantry, he was seen to be mocking them. As W.R. Rodgers noted, “Even Synge’s choice of Irish phrase was, and still is, a point of dispute.” Yet, 100 years later, we are served his plays as authentic renditions of a folk life long disappeared, rather than a keenly observed interpretation.
The Druid Theatre Company kicked off UCLA Live’s seventh International Festival (continuing through December), presenting two of its award winning plays, The Shadow of the Glen and The Playboy of the Western World, by John Millington Synge. For Festival ticket information and schedule, phone (310) 825-2101 or online at www.uclalive.org.