Early twentieth century Irish theater has a hard time in America today. The accents, which are integral to the cadences of the old peasant idiom, are frequently a problem for our actors, who not only struggle to produce plausible tones but often deliver limply the words of the theater’s great writers, W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge. Compounding this is a common failure of the theatrical imagination. All the things the theater uniquely gives us – gestures, lighting, non-verbal sound – and which should be symbiotic with the words, are often given short shrift. The problem with these productions is complacency:  they are too comfortable with the reputation of the work or the author or both, and the actors perform as if the audience’s familiarity has freed them from much of their labor.

And yet the failures don’t seem to matter. We go to performances of these ill-served works happy to repress apprehensions of inadequacy, drawn by the desire to see something we love as it was meant to be – not in a book, but on the stage. Recently, I went with such credulity to a preview of The Pearl Theatre Company‘s new production of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, which opened on October 11th and will run until November 22nd at New York City Center Stage II. As with last spring’s festival of Yeats plays at the Irish Repertory Theatre, this show was harmless, “fun,” and stillborn.

In the play, a young man who believes he has killed his father appears in a rural public house and, inadvertently delighting the locals in telling of his violent act, becomes an object of romance and reverence. Over the course of the next 24 hours, he – Christy Mahon – who until he proclaimed himself a patricide, we find out, didn’t have much of a reputation, strives to maintain and aggrandize his new status through various trials, including the eventual appearance of his not-dead-but-wounded father. This might sound to some like a gentle parlor comedy, a lá George Bernard Shaw, but it is far from any such thing. When it debuted in 1907, amid growing Irish nationalism, it was received as a vituperative attack on the character of the country’s peasantry and met with boos and riots. Yet this anecdote, like the synopsis, also fails the play, for it is far more nuanced than a bifurcated categorization of satire and sympathy allows.  

The principal flaw of this production is that they have confused folk subjects with a folksy narrative. Synge’s irony and macabre humor have been bowdlerized and replaced with an almost vaudevillian quaintness – the characters’ sprightly lack of self-awareness is indistinguishable from the presentation. The laughs feel closer to “the false joy of the musical comedy” that Synge condemned than to the “rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality,” which he believed should be the heart of the theater.

It also suffers from the theatrical complacency mentioned earlier. The development of man and society over the last hundred years has done little to make the play antique, and at this show, I was mostly struck by missed opportunities. It was as if beneath every innocuous utterance the muted wit could be heard begging to be in keener hands. The peasants’ sordid fascination with Christy’s murder and their eagerness to mythologize his person has much in common with our mass culture’s worship of celebrity and obsession with the grotesque. Today’s public figures – politicians, actors, musicians – live by myth-making, which is a constant and precarious effort. In favorable times, they embellish; in unfavorable ones, when the whims of the collective have turned against them, they fight to save face. In the vicissitudes of Christy’s interactions with the locals, we behold a microcosmic prophecy of the crude and desperate struggles that are inescapable in our society.

It’s not a light thought that the work of Synge and his peers may have had its moment and is now, as are the people who were its subjects, irretrievable – something we may never see or hear. But until a modern company makes these old plays stand up, they will remain, deficiently, as relics.