



Produced by Judith Boss





RIDERS TO THE SEA

A PLAY IN ONE ACT

By J. M. Synge




INTRODUCTION

It must have been on Synge's second visit to the Aran Islands that he
had the experience out of which was wrought what many believe to be his
greatest play. The scene of "Riders to the Sea" is laid in a cottage
on Inishmaan, the middle and most interesting island of the Aran group.
While Synge was on Inishmaan, the story came to him of a man whose body
had been washed up on the far away coast of Donegal, and who, by reason
of certain peculiarities of dress, was suspected to be from the island.
In due course, he was recognised as a native of Inishmaan, in exactly
the manner described in the play, and perhaps one of the most poignantly
vivid passages in Synge's book on "The Aran Islands" relates the
incident of his burial.

The other element in the story which Synge introduces into the play is
equally true. Many tales of "second sight" are to be heard among Celtic
races. In fact, they are so common as to arouse little or no wonder in
the minds of the people. It is just such a tale, which there seems no
valid reason for doubting, that Synge heard, and that gave the title,
"Riders to the Sea", to his play.

It is the dramatist's high distinction that he has simply taken the
materials which lay ready to his hand, and by the power of sympathy
woven them, with little modification, into a tragedy which, for dramatic
irony and noble pity, has no equal among its contemporaries. Great
tragedy, it is frequently claimed with some show of justice, has
perforce departed with the advance of modern life and its complicated
tangle of interests and creature comforts. A highly developed
civilisation, with its attendant specialisation of culture, tends ever
to lose sight of those elemental forces, those primal emotions, naked to
wind and sky, which are the stuff from which great drama is wrought by
the artist, but which, as it would seem, are rapidly departing from us.
It is only in the far places, where solitary communion may be had with
the elements, that this dynamic life is still to be found continuously,
and it is accordingly thither that the dramatist, who would deal with
spiritual life disengaged from the environment of an intellectual maze,
must go for that experience which will beget in him inspiration for
his art. The Aran Islands from which Synge gained his inspiration are
rapidly losing that sense of isolation and self-dependence, which has
hitherto been their rare distinction, and which furnished the motivation
for Synge's masterpiece. Whether or not Synge finds a successor, it is
none the less true that in English dramatic literature "Riders to the
Sea" has an historic value which it would be difficult to over-estimate
in its accomplishment and its possibilities. A writer in The Manchester
Guardian shortly after Synge's death phrased it rightly when he wrote
that it is "the tragic masterpiece of our language in our time; wherever
it has been played in Europe from Galway to Prague, it has made the word
tragedy mean something more profoundly stirring and cleansing to the
spirit than it did."

The secret of the play's power is its capacity for standing afar off,
and mingling, if we may say so, sympathy with relentlessness. There is a
wonderful beauty of speech in the words of every character, wherein the
latent power of suggestion is almost unlimited. "In the big world the
old people do be leaving things after them for their sons and children,
but in this place it is the young men do be leaving things behind for
them that do be old." In the quavering rhythm of these words, there is
poignantly present that quality of strangeness and remoteness in beauty
which, as we are coming to realise, is the touchstone of Celtic
literary art. However, the very asceticism of the play has begotten a
corresponding power which lifts Synge's work far out of the current of
the Irish literary revival, and sets it high in a timeless atmosphere of
universal action.

Its characters live and die. It is their virtue in life to be lonely,
and none but the lonely man in tragedy may be great. He dies, and then
it is the virtue in life of the women mothers and wives and sisters to
be great in their loneliness, great as Maurya, the stricken mother, is
great in her final word.

"Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the grace of the
Almighty God. Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards,
and a deep grave surely. What more can we want than that? No man at
all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied." The pity and
the terror of it all have brought a great peace, the peace that passeth
understanding, and it is because the play holds this timeless peace
after the storm which has bowed down every character, that "Riders to
the Sea" may rightly take its place as the greatest modern tragedy in
the English tongue.

EDWARD J. O'BRIEN.

February 23, 1911.




RIDERS TO THE SEA

A PLAY IN ONE ACT

First performed at the Molesworth Hall, Dublin, February 25th, 1904.




PERSONS

     MAURYA (an old woman)......  Honor Lavelle

     BARTLEY (her son)..........