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FULL CAST PRODUCTION
Cast:
Christopher Mahon: Cyril Cusack
Margaret Flaherty, called Pegeen Mike: Siobhan McKenna
Shawn Keogh, a young farmer: Thomas Studley
Michael James Flaherty, a publican: Seamus Kavanagh
Philly Cullen, a small farmer: John McDarby
Jimmy Farrell, a small farmer: Milo O’Shea
Widow Quin: Maire Kean
Sara Tansey: Maureen Cusack
Susan Brady: May Craig
Honor Blake: Maureen Toal
Old Mahon, a squatter: Harry Brogan
A Town-Crier: Alex Dignam
Introduction spoken by Cyril Cusack
About
One of the best-known Irish playwrights, John Millington Synge premiered The Playboy of the Western World in 1907. It immediately provoked controversy, eventually resulting in the infamous ‘Playboy’ riots. It has been recorded and adapted many times, but this timeless recording stars the Irish actors who made it a classic, including Siobhan McKenna and Cyril Cusack.
Synopsis
The action of the play takes place entirely in a country pub near a village on the wiId coast of County Mayo in western Ireland. Here live publican Michael Flaherty and his fiery daughter Pegeen. She is being courted by the fat and cowardly Shawn Keogh, whom she despises, and when young Christy Mahon appears with a tale of killing his bullying father with a single mighty blow of his spade, she is fascinated. If feelings are developing between Christy and Pegeen, they are not allowed to mature before others try to turn Christy’s head. The village girls find him fascinating too, as does Widow Quin, and Christy becomes the local hero, even winning the village mule race as a true ‘playboy of the western world.’ However, his credibility is destroyed when his father appears, nursing a fractured skull and telling tales of his miserable puny son. Christy is no longer able to sustain the hopes and dreams that the village has invested in him, and is devastated when he loses Pegeen’s love, so much so that he attacks his father a second time. Now the gap opens irrevocably between the ‘gallows story’ and the ‘dirty deed’, with the ‘dirty deed’ all that the community see, and they turn violent towards him. The peasantry, thinking that Christy really has killed his father this time – and with them all as witnesses – try to string him up. Pegeen leads them in the effort to bring him to due process of the law. Christy is appalled to see Pegeen turn on him, and she even brands him with a turf ember. But Old Mahon recovers, to Christy’s amazement, ‘to be killed a third time’, and in the end, father and son leave together with considerably more mutual respect, leaving Pegeen to lament in an agony of solitude that she has ‘lost the only playboy of the western world.’
Run Time: 1h 27m
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