ABSTRACT
The Abbey production of J.M. Synge's comedy The Playboy of the Western World resulted in a violent controversy in Dublin, the echoes of which were to follow that play in future productions by the company in the USA, and were sounded regularly in WBY's future writings about the history of the Irish dramatic movement. Although events in the theatre itself were initially chaotic, with loud disruption from some of the audience rendering the play impossible to hear, and with the police being brought in by the Abbey to attempt some kind of crowd control, and to keep the peace between rival factions of anti- and pro-Playboy protesters (many of them the worse for drink), the more substantial attacks on the production took place in the pages of the Dublin press.
