Playboy of the Western World review – Nicola Coughlan brings comedy and tragedy to this pub drama | National Theater

eWomen love a bad boy, or so the cliche goes. This is where the matter is put to the test when Christy Mahon enters a pub to confess that he killed his father with an agricultural implement. This is not quite the truth, but, to his own surprise, he has turned into a local celebrity. Women flock to see him and men hail him as a hero.

John Millington Synge’s comically unromantic depiction of a farming community in the west of Ireland caused moral outrage in its 1907 premiere at the Abbey Theater in Dublin. This revival by the abbey’s current artistic director, Caitriona McLaughlin, makes it clear that it’s like a feminist play, ahead of its time, in which two women abandon conservative Catholic morals in the hope of achieving something greater than a scratchy little country existence.

Nicola Coughlan plays vivacious waitress Peggy, who impresses Christie enough to dump her fiancé Sean (Marty Rea). Siobhán McSweeney, as Widow Quin, is more strategic and overtly lecherous. Both walk a fine line between comedic desire and serious inner aspirations. “It’s true that all girls are fond of spunk,” says Widow Queen, and Ayanna Hardwicke, as Christie, manages the transformation from geek to hero to geek again in a way that shows how little he has changed, but how willing those around him are to believe him.

The tragedy of the two central women lurks just beneath the surface, rising at times, from the widow’s anguish at not being the woman Christie chose, to Pegeon’s final words of remorse after Christie is exposed and thrown out of the bar. Masked musicians in headdresses and straw skirts ritualistically walk through the back of a drinking bar open to the sky and with a drunken slant, designed by Katie Davenport.

But there are bumpy transitions between the drama of the first half, with its subtly twisted tension and notes of anxiety, to the physical comedy and outright farce of the second. The lavish pace accelerates to a gallop while the plot soars into melodrama. Presented in his original, melodious Hiberno-English dialect, it is authentic but sometimes difficult to follow, at least for this critic. Some may not understand the nuances of the dialogue although the beauty of the language is abundant enough to enjoy. “A character’s whole hide needs to be washed like a Wicklow sheep,” and he hears the last of the cows “heaving and sighing in the dark” before emerging into the light of the pub.

The influence of the play is clear: Christie may be a blueprint for Jez Butterworth’s self-mythical silver-tongued rooster in Jerusalem. The tall tales told in Conor McPherson’s The Weir pub may have the imprint of Michael James Flaherty’s public house here, as the action takes place over two days. Synge could be the Tarantino of his time, highlighting Christie’s violence. But it seems old-fashioned in this faithful period of production.

The central critique—the hollow elevation of a claimant by a (desperate?) society in desperate need of a hero—remains valid, but perhaps has greater resonance in our populist age.