ABSTRACT
In 1976 the author attended a schools matinee of J. M. Synge's Irish rural tragicomedy The Playboy of the Western World at the Olivier Theatre in London, with Stephen Rea in the lead role and with the Irish folk band The Chieftains providing the music. Synge's play was first produced just as the struggle for Irish independence from Great Britain was reaching a climax in the early years of the twentieth century. Apart from the nationalist political struggle there was a cultural battle for independence to be fought. In the first decade of the twentieth century there were some disturbances in theatres in protest at representations of Irish people in Dublin, but in Liverpool and in New York, cities with substantial Irish communities. In the popular English theatre and in the music halls of the nineteenth century the depiction of Irish peasants as stupid and venal was, according to the historian of Dublin's Abbey Theatre, an invidious form of propaganda.
