You can, as Ken Tynan said when confronted by the umpteenth revival of Playboy of the Western World, have too much of a good Synge. Given the intimacy of the National's Cottesloe theatre, why not revive less familiar Synge plays such as the brilliant, Beckettian Well of the Saints or even that strange romantic saga, Deirdre of the Sorrows?
The sense of deja vu is confirmed by Fiona Buffini's production which, in interpretative terms, is very similar to that by Lynne Parker at the Almeida seven years ago. Historically the play was seen as a robust satire on a peasant community's romantic attitude to violence and murder - and highly offensive to its 1907 audience. But Buffini, like Parker, views the play as a rural tragedy about loneliness. Both Christy Mahon, the presumed father-slayer, and Pegeen Mike, the publican's daughter, are motherless solitaries magnetically drawn to each other. The difference is that Christy, liberated by the initial hero-worship and a second assault on his father, becomes a new man, while Pegeen, having helped to transform Christy, is left to face a life of unrelieved misery.
It is a perfectly valid reading, one that brings out the play's mythic, as opposed to purely parochial, quality. But, in single-mindedly pursuing it, Buffini neglects both Synge's comedy and his prose-poetry. Pegeen's final grief is greater if it emerges from a cumulative background of laughter; but here even surefire moments such as the arrival of Christy's supposedly dead father go for little. In seeking to avoid melodious Synge-song Buffini also damps down the artfully cadenced prose - wrongly so, since one of the qualities that attracts Pegeen to Christy is his fanciful gift of the gab.
On the positive side, Derbhle Crotty is an outstandingly good Pegeen Mike. Right from the start, keys forever dangling at her waist, she suggests a life of doleful drudgery made worse by the prospect of marriage to a priest-ridden coward. Crotty expresses a habituated solitude briefly illuminated by Christy's arrival; she also subtly implies she is prepared to tolerate his yarn-spinning for the sake of his masculine assurance.
It is a finely calibrated performance - her final disillusion is genuinely unnerving - and she is decently partnered by Patrick O'Kane as Christy. He is nothing like "the queer, low fellow" the text suggests, but he effectively conveys Christy's growth - if such it be - from furtive fugitive to a man of truly violent authority. Sorcha Cusack as the predatory Widow Quinn and John Rogan as Pegeen's exploitative father lend staunch support, and Robert Jones's set is all shebeen-roughness and smoky turf-fires. But although the rural realism is faithfully done there is an extravagant wildness to Synge's tragicomedy that eludes this sombre production.
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