Review: The Playboy of the Western World (Lyttlelton Theatre)

Review by Lily Melhuish

⭐️⭐️⭐️

When playwright John Millington Synge premiered The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, Dublin audiences rioted. Expecting a romantic portrait of rural Ireland, they were confronted instead with Synge’s unsparing vision: a community that elevates a supposed murderer to hero status, intoxicated by scandal. More than a century later, director Caitríona McLaughlin’s National Theatre production honours the original themes while probing its modern echoes: our appetite for notoriety, our quickness to crown and cancel. 

The opening scene prepares us for ritual and spectacle. A woman keens; an ensemble in black glides, identities veiled. A transparent scrim bears the confrontational print of a woman in a red skirt, bare feet planted, hands firm on knees; a bold, almost taunting invitation to consider desire and agency on their own terms. Inside Katie Davenport’s straw-strewn pub is warm ochres and battered timber, tools and ladders hung like reliquaries. We are in County Mayo’s communal living room, where gossip has the velocity of weather, and notoriety passes for fame.

Caitríona McLaughlin rightly leans into the play’s dramaturgical motor: a quiet place where “something” happens. A young man wanders in, boasting he has killed his father, and instead of exile, he is canonised. The mumming motif -  the band and ensemble in sackcloth, straw hats and disguises, slipping through transitions like village ghosts - is a smart contextual touch. Mumming’s hero-combat pattern (a hero kills, the fallen is revived) mirrors Christy’s rise and reanimation in local myth. The production, though, leaves that frame largely implicit; those unfamiliar with the Irish folk tradition will miss how cleanly it rhymes with Synge’s plot and the village’s game of guessing, prodding, and welcoming the masked stranger.

Synge’s Hiberno‑English remains the show’s great seduction. The language lopes and lilts like rolling hills, and this company mostly rides its music. There are moments, especially with the older men, when accent and dialect thicken to opacity. When it’s played for comedy - a gloriously incoherent post–mule race ramble from Michael Flaherty (Lorcan Cranitch) - the murk is the joke; Clarkson’s Farm viewers will hear shades of Gerald Cooper’s endearing incomprehensible musings. Elsewhere, a touch more physical storytelling might bridge the comprehension gap for a diverse audience without betraying authenticity.

Nicola Coughlan’s Pegeen Mike is the production’s true north. In red ankle boots that command your eye, she’s witty, flinty, and undeniably in charge. Coughlan charts the character’s power with economy: the way she says “Christy Mahon,” full name like a title, more than a man but a legend. Her chemistry with Éanna Hardwicke’s Christy has that delicious, circling electricity; a flirtation that feels both playful and tactical. Christy arrives childlike, feet red‑raw from eleven days’ walking; Hardwicke mines superb physical comedy from tender-footed tiptoeing, then lets vanity and swagger bloom as adoration swells. It’s a recognisable transformation: a nobody turned somebody, and the intoxication that follows.

Siobhán McSweeney’s Widow Quin brings characteristic deadpan and an undercurrent of steel, but the role’s operatic boldness sometimes feels dialled down against Hardwicke’s physical bravura. Still, McSweeney’s scenes of tactical complicity, the price of silence, the attempted re-routing of Christy’s affections, are precisely etched and she delivers the satirical comedy well. Marty Rea’s Shawn Keogh fusses and frets with funny, pinched desperation; his bribery plot is a neat comic mechanism revealing the village’s many competing claims on Christy and the battle to win Peggy’s heart.

Design does heavy thematic lifting. Davenport’s queer, quirky pub - dining tables adrift, a modest bar, a solitary floating chair - is both homely and off-kilter, a liminal space where myth can bloom under James Farncombe’s burnished light. The image on entry, that unapologetic red skirt, primes us for a production alert to female appetite. When the village women crowd Christy, gifts in hand, skirts tugged and legs slung over tabletops, the staging recognises both the comic set‑piece and the deeper truth: attention breeds confidence, and group desire can feel like destiny.

McLaughlin’s reading is pointedly contemporary but lacks the boldness and explicitness to fully engage with its modern audience. Christy the “murderer” is celebrated; Christy the liar is unforgivable. Synge’s cautionary thrust, that we love the mask and punish the face, lands: the village’s moral centre moves with the thrill of the story. The show understands our culture’s appetite for spectacle and condemnation, true‑crime obsession, public shaming, and the self‑righteousness of being duped, but you’d struggle to deduce any of this without a thorough read of the programme. 

Not all the mechanics sing. The mule race that introduces the second act is energetically realised with onstage whirl, but a later rope‑fight sequence exposes its joins; you can sense the anticipation before each cue, which flattens danger into demonstration. Most crucially, the final stretch never quite detonates. The offstage duel is dispatched briskly, its outcome telegraphed; what should feel like the collapse of a collective fantasy is more a tidy unmasking. Thematically, the play is about how a community makes and unmakes a legend, and that needs a sharper edge.

And yet, as an evening of language, atmosphere, and performance, it’s compelling. Coughlan is a star turn, magnetic without overstatement, and Hardwicke’s trajectory from meek to mythic is properly seductive. If the production were bolder in explaining its ritual scaffolding and crueller in its final reckoning, it might have matched the brutality Synge smuggles beneath the music. As it stands, it’s a richly textured but jumbled and uneven production that leaves you musing on the speed with which we crown, and cancel, our playboys.

The Playboy of the Western World plays at the Lyttlelton Theatre until 28th February. Tickets from https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/the-playboy-of-the-western-world/

Photos by Marc Brenner