Show Business: Synge Sings

The latest and most engaging off-Broadway musical—3.000 miles off Broadway—is an adaptation of John Millington Synge’s lilting Irish classic, The Playboy of the Western World, which opened last week at London’s Westminster Theater. The adapters: two music students, Nuala O’Farrell, 26, and her sister Mairin, 27, who started the show as a workshop project for Dublin’s University College. They succeeded so well that the play was staged last month at Dublin’s Gaiety Theater and won rave notices.

The musical Playboy, retitled The Heart’s a Wonder, is pure Synge: the rollicking story of Christy Mahon, the peasant boy who became a hero by telling a tale of parricide. The scene is still Michael James Flaherty’s peat-smoked shebeen (pub), and the rich poetic dialogue is still, as Synge said a good play must be, “as fully flavored as a nut or apple.” For music the O’Farrell sisters borrowed Irish ballads. As for the lyrics, they did a remarkable job of bending Synge’s own lifelike speech into rhyme.

Pegeen, the publican’s daughter writes:

To Mulroy, Spirit Dealer of Castlebar town—Six yards of red stuff for to make me a gown

A fine toothy comb and black brassy-eyed shoes

Three barrels of porter and the Western news . . .

That’s all I’ll be wanting, God bless you, Pegeen.

0 Lord! Sure I almost forgot the poteen.

Christy boasts he killed his da:

He drove with the scythe and I lept

to the East Then I turned to the North with my

back to the East And I hit him a blow on the ridge of

his skull Laid him stretched out and split to

the nob of his gull.

And finally Christy sings to his true love, Pegeen:

Love, the night is down

And we two are pacing Neifin

There’s a shiny new moon, maybe

Sinking on the hills

My two hands stretched around you

Till I pity God in Heaven

Is alone in his Golden Chair

While we two are pacing Neifin.

Playwright Synge’s heirs (he died in 1909), who had at first refused to let anyone tamper with Playboy, finally gave their blessings for the O’Farrell production. BBC bought out one performance to broadcast the show, and there were nibbles from U.S. producers. The charm of lyrics, music and dances took some of the original sting out of Synge. Playwright Synge had never liked what he called “the false joy of the musical comedy,” but seeing this show would probably have set his heart awonder.