Fiona Buffini deserves credit for taking on the traditional British attitude of assuming that John Millington Synge's masterpiece is a rollicking, poetic Oirish comedy, discarding the notion in favour of a less poetic, darker interpretation of 19th century peasant life on the west coast of Ireland. Mark Henderson's lighting design allows the action to emerge only slowly from the darkness of a guttering candle at the start when Pegeen Mike is making out her shopping list. Robert Jones's setting of Michael James Flaherty's seaside shebeen is grittily, drippingly dank, and the costumes are unflatteringly in period poverty-stricken mode.
But the audience in the Cottesloe - the smallest of the three theatres in the National - seemed determined not to notice these signals of bleakness in the production and wrest their laughs anyway from the performance. In fairness, there were some inconsistencies which gave them licence in this from time to time so it became comedy without the rollick and Synge's rich language without the rhythm. But they were left in no doubt about the intention of the enterprise when Derbhle Crotty's Pegeen Mike (played throughout with unerring consistency as a plain Jane with oodles of common sense laced with uncertainty about the true value to her of Patrick O'Kane's playboy Christy) bewails what she finally sees as her irreparable loss when he finally goes off with his Da and the lights dim down again to darkness as she howls inconsolably.
O'Kane manages skilfully, with the physical awkwardness of his naivety and the braggart display of his first social success, to show both the good and the bad of Christy, with vapid smiles when he's caught short on sincerity and passionate certainty when he finds himself cut off from Pegeen, the first woman who ever showed him kindness and encouragement. His and Ms Crotty's are two significantly original performances in two cliched parts. Sorcha Cusack's Widow Quinn is the motherly schemer rather than the lonely would-be seducer. James Ellis's Old Mahon manages to convey elderly frailty with a thin voice without ever losing his capacity to bully, not even on his return to Christy to be murdered for the third time. Paul Hickey's craven, crawthumping Sean Keogh is carefully distanced from the caricature which has too often been seen in the past in this characterisation. The rest, with something of a medley of accents and rhythms, provide a persuasively authentic crowd of western peasants.
This Playboy is a thoughtful and rewarding production of a great play and is scheduled to remain in the repertoire until the middle of May.
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