ABSTRACT
At their worst, the disturbances that accompanied the first performances of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World were so overpoweringly noisy that to offer a second opportunity to attend the play seemed to be the only recourse left open to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The extent of the problem was further noted in some satirical verses, penned at the time by one frustrated audience member: “Our own opinion, we admit,/Is rather – well – uncertain,/Because we couldn’t hear one bit/From rise to fall of curtain” (quoted by Berrow in Harmon 1972: 81).
