The Playboy of the Western World

I don’t know this play at all so went in with no preconceptions and just the knowledge that Nicola Coughlan was leading as Pegeen, a young woman trapped in a miserable life surrounded by drunken and foolish men.  In this iteration at least, it's a weird play tonally, lurching from drama to comedy and then into melodrama.  To add to the challenge, there was a definite choice to have the cast speaking in rich Irish accents, so the main conversation I heard on the way out to get an icecream in the interval was people discussing how much they had (or hadn’t) understood.  

The main plot is that a stranger arrives in this tough, wet, tight knit rural community, telling tall tales of heroism. When he arrives it stops raining and the sun comes out and Pegeen, the local widow Quin (a tough Siobhán McSweeney), along with all of the local womenfolk are very smitten with this young man. However, the local men are not so impressed with Christy (Éanna Hardwicke), this newcomer, taking all of the attention.  Eventually after a brief period where he is a local hero and about to be married, the lies catch up with him, he is hounded out of town and Pegeen, is left bereft as it starts raining again.  I had trouble working out what this play was trying to say, and why Nicola Coughlan (I’m a bit of a fan!) wanted to be involved.  Eventually we settled on the idea that this is about the dire situation for women in Ireland in the early 1900s, shown a bit of hope only to find it was all an illusion and back to the drudgery.  That interpretation has some similarities with  Cowbois at the Royal Court back in 2024 which had a town of women in the Wild West similarly unhappy with their lot until a new kind of man comes to town.  Except that had a happy ending.

This production in the Lyttleton at the National Theatre was solid, as were the performances, but there was no shaking the slight air of bewilderment in at least some of the audience. The language is beautiful, and I did enjoy it,  but it is full of complicated poetic and long sentences, and so for me, and maybe a percentage of the London audience it was perhaps a bit brave to give us full strength Irishness with no concessions to our weak English ears.