THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By John Millington Synge
National Theatre - Lyttelton, South Bank, London SE1 9PX, until February 28, 2026
When this play was first performed at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1907, protestors stormed the stage and actors faced death threats. The story of young Christy Mahon (Éanna Hardwicke) stumbling into a pub proclaiming to have killed his father by driving a spade into his head and then becoming a hero on the back of it stirred people up. The image of Irishness it projected was at odds with the respectable, ready-for-self-rule image that Irish nationalists wanted to project at the time.
It was compounded by John Millington Synge's decision to use dialogue that's essentially Hiberno-English, where it's English but using the syntax of the Irish language. But he went beyond that and added a heightened poetry to it. The result is both musical and earthy and laced with a poetic vitality that feels both ancient and startlingly fresh. It's full of extravagant metaphor and comic exaggeration as Christy recounts his various derring-do.
The current co-artistic director of the Abbey, Caitríona McLaughlin, has been brought in to direct a mostly Irish cast, but despite all this native expertise, the result is curiously muddled.
Perhaps it's the challenge of making the accents and idioms intelligible to a non-Irish audience, but she has chosen to slow Act 1 down to a snail's pace. This drains it of energy and dramatic momentum. It's odd because Act 1 is Irish people in a pub "putting off 'em" (as they say back home), and they don't wait for the other person to stop speaking. The pace needs to be doubled. This improves in the second half when comedic action takes over, but again it's oddly blocked and feels lost in the vast expanse of the Lyttelton.
Synge uses Christy's story to expose the community's appetite for spectacle, its willingness to embrace violence when wrapped in charm, and its fickleness when the story no longer suits them, and the ensemble cast here brings all this vividly to life.
Nicola Coughlan (of Bridgerton fame) gives an assured performance as a willful, garrulous young barmaid, Pegeen Mike, who falls under the spell of young Christy. Her Derry Girls castmate, Siobhán McSweeney, also stars and has the flirtatious self-assurance and coquettish air to embody the conniving Widow Quin. Having disposed of her previous husband and taken on the mantle of the village's notorious woman, she competes with Pegeen to win Christy. One false note though - her lush black widow's attire is more Belle Epoque Paris than west Mayo.
Hardwicke's Christy has a gangly, gauche, boyishness about him, which is just perfect. Christy's transformation from trembling fugitive to swaggering "playboy" is a great character arc but is also a commentary on performance itself: how identity can be constructed, embellished, and ultimately undone by the gaze of others. In an age of social media pile-ons and Luigi Mangione, doesn't Pegeen Mike's great line just ring true: "There's a great gap between a gallant story and a dirty deed"?
Amongst great ensemble work, Marty Breen's feisty Sara Tansey invests her scenes with a feral energy, while Declan Conlon is a gloriously no-nonsense Old Mahon (Christy's father), and Lorcan Cranitch does some of the best drunk acting seen in a long time as Pegeen's father.
Production credits are top-class, with Katie Davenport's designs managing to be both solid and painterly, like the fickle weather of west Mayo itself.
McLaughlin frames the action with ominous straw-clad figures or wailing veiled women appearing upstage. These refer to pre-Christian Irish folk traditions which persisted well into the 20th century. There's 'mumming,' where musicians and singers dress in straw and sackcloth and go house to house performing in troupes, or there's the 'caoineadh,' or keening, where women engage in a form of structured mourning at every funeral wake. If you're not familiar with these, you might think you have accidentally walked into The Lion King.
But the play belongs to Coughlan. Pegeen Mike's yearning for something beyond the confines of her world, and her fury when that possibility collapses, gives the play its tragic weight, and her final cry remains one of the most devastating in Irish drama.
