The parable of Synge's great creation Christy Mahon sounds echoes for our own downturning society: it is a reminder of who is scapegoated in difficult times, writes Joseph O'Connor
IN LAST MONTH'S New York Review of Books, the novelist Michael Chabon published an account of attending a Barack Obama rally. He described the African immigrant's son who will be America's next president as "dogged and perspicacious, considerate, principled but pragmatic, driven, and oddly blessed with a kind of universal point of human connection, of the understanding of loss, in the place where the memory of his father ought to be".
It's a characterisation that brought John Millington Synge and his work to mind, for Synge, like Obama, was raised without a father and came to adulthood aware that it would always be his fate to belong to several cultures simultaneously. It is this never-ending conflict that super charges his writing, giving it the power to trouble and enthral us, still.
Throughout his short life Synge was captivated by outsiders, by those who feel intensely competing allegiances. The son of a land-owning Protestant Dublin family, he was cosmopolitan, educated, widely travelled, had a private income, and yet seems to have been rarely at peace except while exploring the byways of rural Ireland, where he would converse with the hobos who obsessed him. Seamus Heaney writes that he "Was never happier than when he was on the road/With people on their uppers. Loneliness/Was his passport through the world."
A surviving typescript rants wearily of suburban life ("Kingstown, the heat, and the frowsy women") and many of his almost daily love letters to his fiancee, the Abbey actress Molly Allgood, for whom he wrote the part of Pegeen Mike in The Playboy, are signed with the telling valediction "Your Old Tramp". However she may have seen him - and that is another story - there is no doubt that he saw himself as a sort of migrant among the settled, a blow-in to an Ireland of many ambivalences.
And so here is a play about a father who is reportedly dead, a story of a traveller who hails from a distant world, a magnificently gifted wordsmith on to whom the fears and fantasies of the natives are soon being splashed like verbalised graffiti. Christy Mahon, like Lemuel Gulliver in another Dubliner's masterpiece, finds himself a giant in the eye of his beholders. He is a chancer, a wideboy, a rogue, a gangsta rapper, a paycock, a stage Irishman, a Johnny-come-lately, an upstart, but fundamentally an immigrant. The play would make no sense if Christy had been born in this Lilliput. It is his status as refugee thrown upon the kindness of strangers that animates the story at every point.
And this parable of who belongs - and who finally does not - sounds echoes for our downturning society. For if we invite those who come here to murder their fathers, to annihilate the culture that helped make them what they are, we make of our own western world an impoverished backwater that cannot survive the buffetings of fate. Christy is an asylum seeker but he is also something more: a reminder of who is scapegoated in difficult times. His brilliantly unfolded tragedy is that he cannot see it. Thus he talks himself into a kind of deportation.
THE PLAY ITSELF is the child of an intercultural marriage (as though any marriage can be anything but that). The shocking energy and fire of the original dialogue comes from the fact that it is not authentic in the documentary sense. Synge takes the idiomatic English he heard spoken on his ramblings and uses it as a sculptor might mould clay on a wheel. He slops the words around, presses them into hardness, or bangs them together with a ferocity that produces sparks. What emerges from the smoke, like a treasure from a kiln, is a vision of worlds brought together.
In that sense, it is exhilaratingly appropriate that two gifted contemporary playwrights have taken Synge's text as raw material. For the play is not only about self-renewals, re-inventions, revisions; it embodies them in the ways it exists. "All art is a collaboration," Synge once wrote. The Playboy certainly is, and always was.
The most famous and endlessly discussable anecdote about Synge is one he himself was fond of narrating. He tells how he was spending the night in a comfortable house in Wicklow when he awoke to the sound of conversation in his room. Realising it was emanating from the kitchen below, he knelt and put his ear to a chink in the floorboards and excitedly eavesdropped on the servants. It is difficult, reading his account, to see the story exactly as its narrator did, for what emerges is his yearning, so poignant because impossible, to pass through the floor, to be one of the people talking so freely beneath him. But it is easier for a camel to negotiate the eye of a needle than for a Kingstowner to be a citizen of that kitchen. If it is Christy Mahon's tragedy that exile proves finally impossible, it was also, in a way, Synge's own. The religious and class differences between him and Molly Allgood (the daughter of a Catholic mother who sold second-hand furniture) were seized upon by their families and other associates as reasons why marriage would be unwise. It's an irony that, at the Abbey, Yeats and Lady Gregory loved plays about the Irish poor but the prospect of Synge sleeping with one of their number was so unnerving.
His last letters to Molly would break a stone's heart: "If only my health holds we will be able to get on now." But the cues have all been missed; he did not recognise them when they came, and the long-rehearsed plans are not to be realised. Five painful months after the death of his mother, he himself will die, aged 38, following a hopeless operation for Hodgkin's disease. Distraught, his lover will beseech a priest to say a requiem mass, but will be told that the request is impossible to grant. He was not one of us. He was of the other persuasion. Not everyone can belong to the tribe.
Probably he would have understood, would not have wanted any fuss. All his life he had to attune to subtle transmissions of his unacceptability. He knew what it is to find yourself walled out, separated by boundaries you did not yourself make; to have to gaze through whatever chink may be found at the people whose acceptance you burned for. At the time of his death, no member of his immediate family had ever seen one of his plays.
"My dearest Love," begins his farewell letter to Molly. "This is a mere line for you, my poor child, to bid you good-bye and ask you to be brave and good and not to forget the good times we've had and the beautiful things we've seen together." It is signed "Your old friend." He is no longer the tramp. There is no need to be in character any more. It might almost have been written by Christy to his broken-hearted Pegeen, or by any other immigrant who ever braved the fear-filled world in the longing search for a home.
Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle's version of The Playboy of the Western World returns to the Abbey Theatre, previewing from December 12th and opening on December 16th.
Joseph O'Connor's novel Redemption Falls is published by Vintage and has been nominated for the Impac Literary Award. He is currently working on a novel about Synge and Molly Allgood