Last Updated on December 12, 2025
4.0 out of 5.0 starsA Trip into the Heart of Rural Ireland
There’s been a big buzz about the new National production of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. It has a starry cast led by Nicola Coughlan (Bridgerton), who is reuniting on stage with her Derry Girls colleague Siobhán McSweeney. With fellow Irish actor Éanna Hardwicke (The Sixth Commandment) as the male lead and direction from Caitríona McLaughlin, the Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, the National has plundered the emerald isle of some of its finest thespian talent for this production.
The Playboy of the Western World is a classic of modern Irish theatre written in Synge’s Hiberno-English dialect. First staged at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre on 26 January 1907, the premiere provoked intense hostility from sections of the audience, who objected to what they saw as the play’s glorification of parricide, its frank sexual talk, and its portrayal of Irish rural life. Hisses, interruptions and thrown objects marred performances during the first week, and the disturbances became known as the “Playboy Riots,” with several arrests each night. Despite the protests, W. B. Yeats and Augusta Gregory kept the play in the Abbey repertoire, defending Synge’s artistic freedom and gradually transforming the work from scandal to staple. By 1911, a New York production met similar nationalist protests, yet international tours and revivals steadily established the play as a central text of modern Irish theatre.
Set entirely in Michael James Flaherty’s pub on the Mayo coast (in the west of Ireland, hence the title). It’s a brutal, raw world populated by drunken farmers and desperate women. The Playboy of the Western World begins when Christy Mahon arrives exhausted, claiming he has killed his tyrannical father with a blow from a spadelike loy. The locals, especially the women, are enthralled by his tale; Pegeen Mike, the publican’s daughter, abandons her timid fiancé Shawn Keogh as Christy’s confidence and storytelling grow.
The illusion collapses when Old Mahon, bloodied but alive, bursts in searching for his son, revealing Christy’s story as half-fantasy. Humiliated, Christy attempts to kill his father “properly” before the villagers, but they turn on him in horror, prompting Pegeen’s final realisation that she has driven away “the only playboy of the western world,” a man remade by his own myth.
Designer Katie Davenport has created a cavernous stage set topped off by a corrugated iron roof. There’s a peat fire in the corner, a small bar serving beer and potcheen and assorted wooden chairs and tables. The back is open, looking out on the sea with just some sea grass as an ineffective barrier between the land and the elements. This allows lighting director James Farncombe to create stunning washes of colour that change as the hours pass.
The stage is a sea of thread; traditional woollen trousers, tweed jackets imbued with symbolic imagery, maypoles with ribbons hanging. It’s a profoundly textural and musical experience which ebbs and flows as the drama intensifies. Synge was himself a musician, and Caitríona McLaughlin has constructed a polyphony of authentic regional Irish voices, sometimes unintelligible to this ear (my neighbours thought so too), that together create a melodious weave of characters. The addition of Erin Hennessey’s fiddle only adds to the effect.
It’s a world infused with religiosity, spirituality and superstition. The Playboy of the Western World opens with silhouetted mourners wailing and keening, dressed in black cowls and creating a sonic counterpoint to the wildness of the county Mayo coastline. There are mummers and straw-masked wrenboys adding to the feeling of otherworldliness.
Éanna Hardwicke plays the stranger Christy Mahon, arriving in this tight-knit community as a gangly, fey neurotic, a man-child blessed with the gift of the blarney. Given to squealing when anxious as well as acting out the murder of his “da” for attention, he might seem an unlikely focus of sexual interest for the local womenfolk, but given the competition, he stands out for his novelty value and his reputation as a man of action compared to the drunks and cowards that inhabit the village. Dressed in long hooped socks, slightly ridiculous tartan shorts and a jockey’s silks after emerging triumphant from the local games, his status is firmly cemented as the new local hero. It’s a painfully compelling performance that reminds us that the cult of celebrity is not a new phenomenon.
We first see Nicola Coughlan as Pegeen Mike, the pub landlord’s daughter, stretching her legs out on a bar bench, wearing striking scarlet ankle boots and stockings. Coughlan gives a feisty performance as a young woman who has had to manage drunks her whole life. Dropping her guard, she is seduced by Christy’s way with words and his outsider status and has no trouble ditching her erstwhile fiancé Shawn Keogh, played with a bravura level of weediness by Marty Rea. Her realisation after the tumultuous crescendo of the final act that she has pushed away her only opportunity for some kind of liberation is a shattering outpouring of grief, disillusionment and self-hatred.
Pegeen’s main love rival for Christy’s attentions is the older predatory Siobhán McSweeney’s Widow Quin, who, in a commanding performance in her tight-fitting fisherman’s raincoat, brings a pneumatic sense of sexual repression to the part.
There are three fathers in The Playboy of the Western World. The offstage Father Reilly exerts a rigorous influence over the whole community, which you sense might implode into anarchy without the church’s moral strictures. Lorcan Cranitch as Pegeen’s publican father, Michael James, gives the most convincing performance of extreme drunkenness that I have ever witnessed, his body seemingly on the verge of dissolving into an alcoholic puddle.
Declan Conlon is grizzled, bitter and angry as Christy’s father, Old Mahon. Disoriented, scarred and bloody from the confrontation with his son, Conlon effortlessly shifts gears between a vengeful anger, self-doubt and a sense of familial honour. In the supporting roles, Marty Breen brings an almost equine grace to the stage as the long-limbed Sara Tansey.
With Synge’s challenges to an idealistic sense of national propriety no longer relevant to a contemporary audience, Caitríona McLaughlin has transformed The Playboy of the Western World into a glorious love song to rural Ireland, managing to achieve this without the characterisations slipping into parody. The first act has its longueurs and isn’t always easy to follow, with some of the author’s jokes missing their mark. But lubricated by language, the play slips down easily like a cold, creamy pint of Guinness, a frothy head on top of something darker and more mysterious.
The Playboy of the Western World
Lyttelton Theatre
National Theatre,
South Bank,
London SE1 9PX
11th December 2025 – 28th February 2026
Check our theatre previews for the South Bank and Bankside in 2026
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