The Stage

The Playboy of the Western World

Published Friday 8 May 2009 at 15:15 by Andrew Blades

About ten minutes into this new production of Synge’s masterpiece, you may find yourself mesmerised. The musicality of the script, and the rise and fall of the actors’ expert delivery, is so melodious that you may be distracted from the action itself. Fortunately, Druid, in conjunction with the Oxford Playhouse, accentuate the farce as much as the floridity of Synge’s dialogue, and by the end they have a theatrical triumph on their hands.

The comedy bubbles and fizzes, particularly when the three village girls tumble on to the stage in a riot of mucky frocks and giggles. Even the Widow Quinn (Derbhle Crotty), formidable in her funereal black, offsets her own hauteur with saucy glances. This is a play in which death is continually trumped or belittled - where a burial is only the prelude to a wake, and patricide “happens” three times. But it’s life, in all its convoluted glory, that ultimately fends it off.

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in Aaron Monaghan’s Christy, a diminutive farmhand who at first twitches like a nervous rabbit, only to develop into a strutting March hare. It’s a winning performance of light and shade, doing full justice to Christy’s complex mix of naivety and wisdom, egotism and doubt. Perhaps even more stunning is the young Clare Dunne as Pegeen, offering us privileged glances into the fragility behind her youthful assuredness. Her last lines are heartbreaking.

All in all, this is a first class production. Highly recommended.