Theatre review: The Playboy of the Western World

The Lyttelton goes festive, but instead of Christmas 2025 in London we're going to early 20th Century County Mayo and what looks like a harvest festival for Irish classic The Playboy of the Western World. Director Caitríona McLaughlin frames John Millington Synge's tragicomedy with pagan figures playing the fiddle as Christy Mahon (Éanna Hardwicke) arrives in a remote building that doubles as pub and general store for a farming community desperate, it turns out, for some excitement. Christy says he murdered his father, and has spent the last eleven days walking, hoping to escape the law. The store's owner Michael (Lorcan Cranitch) and his daughter Pegeen (Nicola Coughlan) let him stay the night, then give him the job of pot-boy so he can stay longer, and be safe as it appears news of his crime hasn't reached this part of the world.

But it's certainly spread around it, and far from a pariah Christy finds himself the most popular man in the village, with every unmarried woman in the area competing for his attention.

The production has been largely sold on Coughlan, and on the fact that it reunites her with Derry Girls co-star Siobhán McSweeney, and neither disappoints. Coughlan's Pegeen is superficially hard-nosed and abrupt, bossing Christy around when he first arrives, but under that exterior she's as excited by him as he is by her - although whether there's any genuine romantic interest there, or if he just represents an alternative to her trapped life and unenthusiastic, arranged engagement to Shawn (Marty Rea) is never quite obvious.

McSweeney is equally good in a very different way as the more broadly comic Widow Quin - Katie Davenport's costumes for her really set up the character, technically mourning black but the most eye-catching outfits of anyone on stage, making her both the centre of attention and reminding us that, as someone who’s been married, she’s a single but sexually experienced woman who can be more openly lascivious than the others. She’s hilariously horny but with a predatory edge as well as her own quiet desperation which, like everyone else, sees an outsider as a possibility for something different.

Hardwicke’s Christy is a sweet dimwit who can’t believe his luck, highlighting what I think this production most clarifies, the quiet desperation of a community so isolated it’s willing to cast him as a hero and a catch. The men briefly get their comic moment as Cranitch, Naoise Dunbar as Jimmy and Matthew Forrest as Philly get a drunken scene in the aftermath of the festival, but this is largely the women’s show to dominate.

I think the production could maybe have been a bit less particular about authenticity where accents and dialect are concerned – at the end of the day this is still a London audience and I felt like a lot of potentially funny lines were being met with stony silence simply because they’re so hard to understand. The laughter only really gets going once the arrival of the presumed dead Old Mahon (Declan Conlon) edges things closer to farce. And this leads to my other main issue with the production, that it never feels like it quite balances the comedy and drama of the story, leading to lulls just where things should be picking up; and while Coughlan is doing sterling work in her final, emotional lines, the last act’s eventual release into overdue comedy means they’re greeted with laughter. If the show’s been sold on its female stars they’re the ones who deliver, but the production around them never quite rises to their level.

The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge is booking until the 28th of February at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton.

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.