Abstract
This chapter tries to uncover the violence between humans rather than that by humans against animals. Its focus is J.M. Synge’s oddly neglected play Playboy of the Western World. The culture wars and associated media frenzy over the play provide an ever-looming backcloth against which to interpret the meanings of intergenerational violence in a colonial society lurching towards national self-determination. Progress and failure, triumph and despair, tragedy and comedy—Playboy’s swirling plot and counterplot offer fertile ground for studies of lethal violence. Besides shedding fresh light on some of the shenanigans around Playboy, this chapter shows the worth of directing attention not only to a medium that is seldom dwelt upon, namely, the cultural productions of playwrights, but also to the social context of their performance.
Gallous, 1. n., alt. gallows; 2. adj., deserving to be hanged;
3. daring, wicked, mischievous; 4. type of humour.
This chapter adds a few details to Piers Beirne and Ian O’Donnell, ‘Gallous Stories or Dirty Deeds? Representing Parricide in J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World,’ 2010, Crime Media Culture, 6(1): 27–48. © Piers Beirne and Ian O’Donnell.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This is not to say that animal abuse and theriocide do not appear in Playboy. Far from it, and not only just below the surface. Pegeen, for example, refers to ‘Marcus Quin, God rest him, got six months for maiming ewes’ (PWW, 1: 48–49). Again, Christy admits that he never had ‘a sight of joy or sport saving only when I’d be abroad in the dark night poaching rabbits … and I near got six months for going with a dung-fork and stabbing a fish’ (PWW, 1: 432–35). Moreover, Jimmy remarks that he knew someone once who ‘was kicked in the head by a red mare, and he went killing horses a great while’ (PWW, 3: 74–76).
- 3.
Pegeen described the widow’s crime as ‘a sneaky kind of murder’ (1: 520) which involved a cut with a rusty pick that caused blood poisoning and eventual death and won ‘small glory’ with the locals (1: 518–21). Widow Quin admits that she ‘destroyed her man’ and ‘buried her children’ (1: 524). This means that she killed her husband. Possibly, too, she also killed her children or, like so many others, they succumbed to one of the hazards or illnesses of infancy. One wonders whether, in keeping with the spirit of Playboy, a flagrant assault generating more blood and gore and split bones would have commanded greater respect from the widow’s peers.
- 4.
The Freeman’s Journal, 28 January 1907: 10.
- 5.
Bretherton (1991: 323).
- 6.
See further Frazier (2004).
- 7.
Synge (1907a).
- 8.
Synge (1907b: 333).
- 9.
Kiberd (1979: 20–21).
- 10.
Bessai (1968).
- 11.
- 12.
Kiberd (1995: 171).
- 13.
- 14.
Synge (1907c: 62). Tomás O Máille has challenged Synge’s brief recounting of these events in The Aran Islands as being ‘for artistic reasons … factually inaccurate and also a misrepresentation of the kindness of the Inishmore people’ (cited in Súilleabhain 1972: 21–22). He claims, moreover, that rather than romanticizing the would-be patricide, the islanders took pity on the downcast son wrongly deprived of land he had given to his father. In O Máille’s version the father survived his son’s attack and the latter found shelter on the Aran Islands, escaped to Cork, and later to the US. A few years later, he captained a ship to Galway, where he made his identity known to a few trusted friends.
- 15.
Synge (1907c: 62).
- 16.
Kiberd (2000: 426).
- 17.
Galway Express: Mayo, Roscommon, Clare and Limerick Advertiser, 1 February 1873: 3.
- 18.
Although Christy claimed to have buried his father after splitting his head, this is contradicted by his father’s withering observation: ‘Weren’t you off racing the hills before I got my breath with the start I had seeing you turn on me at all?’ (3: 444–45).
- 19.
Police Gazette, or Hue-and-Cry, 31 January 1873: 1.
- 20.
Issue of 4 February 1873: 1.
- 21.
Allen (1997).
- 22.
Carney’s (1986) book is based largely on the accidental discovery of a hand-written manuscript by Franciscan Brother Paul Carney, who had lived in Achill. This narrative, entitled A Short Sketch of the Life and Actions of the Far-Famed James Lynchehaun, the Achill Troglodyte, we have been unable to find.
- 23.
The Times, 7 January 1895: 10.
- 24.
The Times, 18 July 1895: 9.
- 25.
On these details see Carney (1986: 219–24).
- 26.
Bourgeois (1913: 193).
- 27.
- 28.
In Yeats (1907: 630).
- 29.
National Archives of Ireland, Return of Outrages Reported to the Constabulary Office in Ireland (Chief Secretary’s Office: Irish Crime Records).
- 30.
The reports included details of 108 killings, 2 of which have been omitted because they relate to deaths inflicted in 1904 (one each in Fermanagh and Londonderry). In addition, there were thirty-four infanticides, for which no official narratives were available.
- 31.
Carney (1986: 222).
- 32.
Conley (1999).
- 33.
We learn early on, when Christy has yet to learn the value of exaggeration and was more likely speaking with candour, that his father was in and out of custody ‘for battering peelers or assaulting men’ (1: 466–67).
- 34.
The Irish Times, 19 June 1905: 9.
- 35.
The Irish Times, 26 March 1907: 5 and 27 July 1907: 4.
- 36.
The Irish Times, 18 April 1907: 5.
- 37.
‘Pat’ (1907).
- 38.
‘Pat’ (1907).
- 39.
Synge, in The Freeman’s Journal, 30 January 1907: 7.
- 40.
The Irish Times, 28 January 1907: 8.
- 41.
In a letter to Stephen MacKenna in Paris, Synge (1907d: 329) enquired:
I wonder did you hear that Dublin and the Freeman were chiefly outraged because I used the word ‘shift,’ instead of ‘chemise’ for an article of fine linen, or perhaps named it at all. Lady G. asked our charwoman – the Theatre charwoman what she thought of it. The charwoman said she wouldn’t mention the garment at all if it could be helped, but if she did she hoped she would always say ‘chemise,’ even if she was alone!
The woman’s modesty and decorum were at once questioned when she was overheard remarking to the stage carpenter, ‘Ah, isn’t Mr Synge a bloody old snot to write such a play!’
- 42.
Playboy continues to excite interest. In 2004, for example, director Garry Hynes and Galway ’s Druid Theatre Company staged it several times on the Irish mainland and three times on the Aran Islands. In 2006 it was performed in Mandarin in Beijing with an all-Chinese cast; the action was shifted (pun intended!—PB/IOD) to a hairdressers and foot massage parlour. In 2007—the centenary of the ‘Playboy Riots’—the Abbey Theatre staged Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s version of Playboy. This time the action was moved from the west of Ireland to a west Dublin pub; the playboy became Christopher Malomo, a well-educated refugee from Nigeria, on the run after ‘killing’ his father with a pestle for pounding yams. In 2009 Galway ’s Druid Theatre performed Playboy several times in Britain and for one week in Galway City. A second run of the Adigun and Doyle version resulted in a legal action being taken by Mr Adigun against the Abbey Theatre for copyright infringement. He argued, successfully, that his royalties had been underpaid and that the script had been altered without his authorization. The case was settled in 2013.
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Beirne, P., O’Donnell, I. (2018). Gallous Stories or Dirty Deeds? Representing Parricide in J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. In: Murdering Animals. Palgrave Studies in Green Criminology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57468-8_6
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