PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD: Synge, touring

Tour.

THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD
by J M Synge.

Runs: 2hr One interval.
Review: Alan Geary: 26 February 2007 at Thoresby Riding Stgables, Notts.

Up-date to the sixties is a blunder.
It’s an old story. Go-getting director - in this instance Neil Sheppeck - decides that a classic play needs to be made more ‘relevant’ for a contemporary audience and up-dates it - here it’s from 1907 to the swinging sixties. Result? It makes nonsense of the play.

Nowadays the sixties is as much a ‘period’ as any other. More seriously, to set the action in that decade makes the well-observed religiosity, long-windedness and home-spun beauty of Synge’s text seem anachronistic. Co Mayo, by the sixties, was becoming part of the wider world: people there were listening to the sort of stuff Sheppeck uses as background music - not sitting around making coracles.

There are other problems. Some dialogue, for instance Pegeen’s [Eleanor Turner], is delivered too rapidly to be understood. And too much of the acting is over-done, most seriously by David Baynes, playing the rabbity Shawn as a pantomime coward, but also by the two village lasses.

The set is realistic but not realistic enough. Sheppeck should either have gone the whole hog or settled for stylized. At times one or two of the accents sound worryingly Home Counties.

Jack McGabhann’s professional debut as Christy is well done. Turner is too girlish and immature in looks and too sour of expression for a credible love interest, but her [and the play’s] final line is superb.

Gerard Canning, as Michael James, is effective, particularly in the drunken scene, but the most balanced and credible performance comes from Lucia McAnespie, as Widow Quinn; she manages the right mix of knockabout sexiness, genuine pathos and calculating self-interest.

We need an unadulterated production of this play.

Shawn Keogh: David Baynes.
Michael James: Gerard Canning.
Sara Tansey: Lucy Conway.
Philly Cullen: Robert Dobson.
Old Mahon: Ben Gaule.
Widow Quinn: Lucia McAnespie.
Christy Mahon: Jack McGabhann.
Susan Brady: Victoria Porter.
Jimmy Cullen: Owyn Stephens.
Pegeen Mike: Eleanor Turner.

Director: Neil Sheppeck.
Designer: Nicky Bunch.
Lighting: Stuart Green.

2007-02-27 08:40:33