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Theatre listings >
The Playboy Of The Western
World
Playwright - J M Synge
Director - Tony Cownie
Designer - Geoff Rose
Lighting Designer - Chris Davey
Movement Director - Malcolm Shields
Company - Royal Lyceum Theatre Company
Venue - Royal Lyceum Theatre Grindlay St
www.lyceum.org.uk
for on line booking
0131 248 4848
Dates - 7
- 28 September at 7:45 no performances 15,16, 23 Sept
Mats Weds and Sats at 2:30pm except 11 & 28 Sept
Sunday Matinee at 2:30pm on 22 Sept
Run Time 2 hrs 15 mins including 15 interval
Reviewer - Thelma Good
Great acting in ageing play
The Playboy of The Western World - Royal Lyceum Production
Christy Mahon, Patrick Moy and Pegeen Mike, Meg Fraser
© Douglas McBride 2002
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Pegeen Mike stands in her father's bar, the front room of a two roomed
cottage, and she waits for something to happen, not we suspect her marriage
to Shawn, though she's ordering her wedding clothes when the play opens.
Meg Fraser is Pegeen, filling this Mayo woman with a performance
of zest and pain, as she moves from hopes to dashed hopes. Fraser
gives us acting pure and true.
Not just her but the whole of Tony Cownie's cast take this Irish play
and make us feel they're living people, each one a prize idiot. Patrick
Moy is Christy Mahon who stumbles into the cottage. Within its walls
Moy's Christy visibly grows with the telling of the fratricide
that got him there and the Mayo village people's reactions as they come
to see the man who has killed his father, and he finds he has a fine tongue
on him too. Widow Quin, receives a rumbunctious playing as a red haired,
warm interferrer from Carol Ann Crawford. While Steven McNicoll
makes Shawn Keogh (always about to call on the unseen Father Reilly)
a man whose face tells a million stories, all of them against himself.
Gareth Thomas gives a fine underplaying to Michael James, Pegeen's
father, and Matt Costello and Ronnie Simon do stagger wonderful
well as two local farmers, Farrell and O'Cullen, while Mark McDonnell
as Old Mahon revives not once but twice. And finally but not least
are the three girls who turn up to see the man who has done such a dreadful
thing, Sara Tansey, Gemma Burns, Susan Brady Louise Bolton and
Honor Blake, Hazel Darwin Edwards, each gives their individual
one a rounded character as they dare one another on, hormones and the
taste of adventure coursing through their young untried lives. It's a
cast with a fine spread of ages and a thick wodge of talent in each one
of them, veteran or newcomer. The Irish brogue comes out of their mouths
rich and real, only Old Mahon sounds a bit strange but he's had a few
dunts to jumble his brains and tongue.
As Scotland makes moves to develop further and regain its own uniquely
Scottish style and its own ways of speaking, it's interesting to see this
play. Synge wrote in the early 1900s as part of the movement to recover
and maintain the Irish Culture, a movement mainly peopled by the intellectual,
well heeled, yet they tried to reflect the regions and people remote from
their upbringing. In this play it's not a flattering portrait, more sneering
warning than nostalgic celebration. The changes the intervening century
has brought - strangers are now commonplace, marriage isn't so important
or desirable have stuck Synge's plot in the past. It's a view of a section
of a particular culture at a particular time but like The Steamie and
The Slab Boys it is a narrow view. As we make and produce plays for this
New Scotland hopefully some will better reflect its growing middle class,
often urban, often well heeled heart and our changing circumstances.
The set by Geoff Rose, of the low ceiling cottage with its multitude of
containers for holding liquid, makes these Mayo villagers and the Munster
Mahons look full of misguided life, nearly bursting out supersized from
its cream washed walls. The bit of outside path to the cottage visible
above with a rough fence and skyscape behind is made and lit so it reminds
one of the exterior shots of 30 - 50's films shot indoors lovingly, as
in The Thirty Nine Steps. It's not entirely clear from Tony Cownie's direction
whether he thinks the play, like those films, is an affectionate, ironic
or dark take on remote communities. By underplaying the comedy in the
first act, the third act isn't quite as bitter as it could be, despite
the cast's fine efforts, underlining that its tragic comedy is diluted
by changed times and morals.
© Thelma Good 7 September 2002. - Published on EdinburghGuide.com
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