Synge in total harmony

J M Synge is mostly known for 'The Playboy of the Western World', but a season in Edinburgh reveals what we've been missing, says Lynne Walker

The Playboy of the Western World had the most notorious first night, in 1907. No one was killed, but it was a close-run thing. Synge refused to make the earthy Pegeen "a decent likable country girl" or to make the brutal scenes in which the peasants burn the "playboy" Christy with flaming sod less disturbing. Riots and a debate about freedom of speech in Ireland followed. In Synge: A Celebration, a collection of often whimsical and always fascinating writings edited by Colm Toibin, the cultural critic Fintan O'Toole argues that Playboy is "the greatest comedy in the English language since the 17th century".

After years of neglect John Millington Synge is enjoying a revival on stage and page. Garry Hynes and her Druid Theatre Company in Galway have spent a quarter of a century recreating his plays, often over again, investing them with a special vitality and exuberance, a poignancy and a dramatic fervour. Of all Hynes's Druid productions Playboy, which she has recently approached afresh, has been acclaimed for replacing "the lush and the languid with the raw and the immediate" in which "sex hangs in the air and dirt clings to the floor". Now the Druid company is to present all six plays in a day in Edinburgh.

What caused Synge to become so neglected in the years since his death in 1909? "The world saw Synge as Ireland's property, and Ireland saw him as the Abbey Theatre's," suggests O'Toole. In 1950 the Anglo-American Eric Bentley, directing at Dublin's Abbey Theatre (founded by Synge, WB Yeats and Lady Gregory) noted that Synge "emptied the theatre for five years".

"There was a sense that Synge was of the past, and it was also to do with the social and cultural milieu in Ireland after the founding of the state," explains Hynes. "Everything was very much about the status quo, and anything which disturbed that, which Synge most certainly did, was of little interest. It was while rehearsing Playboy when Druid was formed, in 1975, that we realised what an extraordinary play it was. We simply had to continue our engagement with these plays. They spoke so vividly to us. The notion of doing them altogether took shape in the early 1980s but both financially and in terms of what theatre was basically about at that time it was impossible. The idea returned in the last five years, partly fuelled by our belief that, as a company, we should put on productions that others couldn't or didn't."

The parallels between Synge and Beckett ("two great theatrical scions of the Dublin Protestant professional class," O'Toole observes) intrigue Hynes, and not just in their shared inspiration from tramps and beggars or in people whose actions were far removed from their words. "The stark nature of Beckett's vision chimes exactly with Synge's. Synge could never be thought of now as someone isolated at the other end of a century. He runs like a seam through modern Irish theatre history," says Hynes.

"The sense of his importance used to be purely in the context of his role as the founder-director of the Abbey. Those historical connections fenced him in, overshadowing the power of the plays. He knew instinctively what he wanted to write about and what he believed theatre to be, and he pursued that totality of vision, formed by his uncompromising nature, throughout his life. That, along with his celebration of the worth of the individual, makes him wholly contemporary. He had a horror of the role of an institution in repressing individuality."

Which of the many threads running through Synge's work - the balance of illusion and reality, the solitude of women, and the natural cycle of life and death, for instance - does Hynes consider the most distinctive? "Actually, the fine line between tragedy and farce," she replies, "which is to do with his ability to turn round at the brink of the grave and celebrate the vitality of life. That's got a lot to do with his own life. He loved every living creature yet was shockingly aware of death.

"He seemed imprisoned in the effete nature of his own class, a dying breed, and on his trips to Wicklow and the Aran Islands he took photos and made notes on the life and language of the communities he encountered. There that he revelled in the sense of life that he couldn't find in his own surroundings."

Despite his poor health, which resulted in his early death from cancer of the lymphatic glands at just 37, Synge travelled, and studied music in Germany. He was an accomplished violinist and he also studied French at the Sorbonne. It was on a visit to Paris that he met James Joyce, with whom he had many "friendly arguments".

Riders to the Sea - whose desolate Aran landscape is the background for a mother's tragic loss of her last two sons to sea - highlights both the struggle of man against nature and its acceptance by women with no alternative. The Well of the Saints centres on two blind beggars, a man and his wife, who have their sight miraculously restored by a saint but who lose their happiness in the process.

"I find an amazing resonance in his female characters," says Hynes. "I marvel that he was capable of writing women's characters of such individuality. Take The Shadow of the Glen: in a short half-hour play, the woman makes the decision to walk out on the roads rather than be imprisoned in a loveless marriage. And she made that choice not just because she was married to an older man but because she saw marriage to a younger man as having the same repressive effect on her. That's a powerful statement, as potent now as it was a hundred years ago."

Having come close to Synge, to the extent that he too turned to the old legend of Deirdre of the Sorrows for inspiration, Vincent Woods recalls being mesmerised by Paul Claudel's Le Soulier de Satin in Orléans while writing his own work. Anyone who saw Olivier Py's marathon 12-hour production of the Claudel when it came to Edinburgh last year will surely recognise Woods's summary of it as "extraordinarily beautiful, funny, transcendent, dazzling the eye and the mind," a description that could equally well be applied to Synge's six plays. And at a mere eight and a half hours, this Synge-along will seem quite short.

Druid Theatre Company performs the complete plays of JM Synge at King's Theatre, Edinburgh (0131-473 2000) Saturday to 3 September