Every woman loves a bad boy, or so the cliche goes. Here it is tested when Christy Mahon walks into a pub to confess he has killed his father with a farming tool. It’s not quite the truth but he is, to his own surprise, turned into a local celebrity. Women flock to see him and men hail him a hero.
John Millington Synge’s unromanticised comic portrayal of a farming community in the west of Ireland caused moral outrage at its 1907 premiere at Dublin’s Abbey theatre. This revival by the Abbey’s current artistic director, Caitríona McLaughlin, makes clear that it is something of a woman’s play, ahead of its time, with two female leads abjuring conservative Catholic morality to hope for something bigger than a small, scratching country existence.
