Playboys of the Western World

Acknowledgements

This book arose out of an offer in December 2003 by Garry Hynes, Artistic Director of Druid, to make the theatre available for a conference on The Playboy of the Western World during the run of her production of that play. It was to be organized by the MA in Drama and Theatre Studies at Hynes’s alma mater, the National University of Ireland, Galway. John Marshall, Dean of the Arts Faculty at the university, liked the idea and helped to fund it.

Rather than a conference on J. M. Synge and his works, textual analysis of the play, or the significance of its first performance to the Irish Literary Revival, it was decided to focus on the long production history of this Irish classic. Leading experts on Synge and Irish theatre when invited to address specific productions of The Playboy worked away with relish, and thanks are due to all those named in the table of contents. Lelia Doolan and Jennifer Johnston came along for the sport, but they did a lot more than that. It would be hard to find someone who is an Abbey actress, Abbey artistic director, expert broadcaster, and university teacher in broadcast journalism to moderate the roundtable discussion, but Lelia Doolan is all that, and Jennifer Johnston’s wise and humorous participation in the discussion was an unexpected treat.

The managing director of Druid, Fergal McGrath, did a large share of the work amiably and efficiently: organizing all the business of the conference itself, getting the proceedings taped and photographed, supplying illustrations for the text, and answering specific queries about the production itself. Thanks are also due to Francis O’Connor, set designer of the Druid 2004 Playboy, for answering questions from writers of this book.

An important feature of the book is its illustrative matter, mostly photographs of earlier productions of the play. Thanks are due to the photographers themselves (where known, individually credited with the illustrations): Catherine Ashmore, John Haynes, Paul McCarthy, and Keith Pattison. The book owes a lot to the work of Christopher Fitz-Simon, a director himself and author of two illustrated books on the Irish Theatre. Several images were scanned from The Irish Theatre (1983). There are splendid photographs, by the way, in Fitz-Simon’s The Abbey Theatre: Ireland's National Theatre: The First 100 Years, currently for sale and available in most good bookshops.

There is practically no book that touches on the Irish Literary Revival that is not obliged to thank Colin Smythe, either for publishing the book, authorizing the use of material by George Moore, Lady Gregory, or AE, or allowing the reproduction of photographs in his collection. We must thank him for images of Maire O’Neill as Pegeen Mike.

Support from John Marshall, Dean, and the Arts Faculty, NUIG, made the original conference possible, and the Grant-in-Aid of Publications Fund, National University of Ireland, Galway, graciously contributed to making this book possible.

Adrian Frazier

List of Illustrations