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by John Millington Synge, directed by Douglas Beattie

Touchmark Theatre, River Run Centre, Guelph

February 16-25, 2001

“An Irish Masterpiece Brought to Life”

Southern Ontario is very lucky to have seen three fine productions of John Millington Synge’s 1907 masterpiece “The Playboy of the Western World” in just the past 12 years.  In 1990 a touring production by the Abbey Theatre of Dublin stopped for performances at the Elgin Theatre.  In 1996 the Shaw Festival mounted a production so popular it was brought back in the following year.  And now we have a production by the Touchmark Theatre in Guelph in only its second season.  Anyone who has seen previous Touchmark shows will not be surprised to learn that of these three this production is the one that most clearly communicates the meaning of the play.  Not only is the text the most clearly spoken, but the central focus of the play, the title character’s relation to his father, is never lost sight of.

With eleven characters, “Playboy” is the biggest production Touchmark or (its predecessor Stagecraft) has mounted.  For director Doug Beattie this is obviously a labour of love.  Both the Abbey Theatre and the Shaw Festival productions took an ultra-realistic approach to the play which is fine for capturing the play’s surface activity, but misses the many layers of meaning below the surface.  Beattie, however, recognizes, as he states in the programme notes, that the play is “a fleshed-out and multi-faceted fable”.  For a play with a main character named Christopher Mahon (“Christ-bearer man”), who wins acclaim in another land for having killed his father, mythic resonances of both the Passion and of Oedipus are not far away. 

The highly poetic prose that Synge’s characters speak constantly expands the realm of the action from a small village to the “Western World” itself, as the title suggests.  Beattie gives his blocking patterns just the right degree of abstraction for us to see the mythic structure of the story below the surface action.  This is particularly evident in the various struggles for control occurring throughout the play—two women Pegeen Mike and the lonely Widow Quin, playing a tug-o’-war with Christie’s arms; the Widow Quin and Christie feeling a sense of exultation while standing on a table; or Christie sitting in the same pose on the same stool by the fire after killing his “da” a second time, while hoping for the same awed response he received earlier.  It’s very rare to find a director who knows how to make the archetypal substrate of a play shine through its naturalistic surface with such clarity.

Dennis Horn’s imaginative set and costumes support Beattie’s view of the work.  His set is realistic enough with its counter, hearth, doors and window, to present us with the pub where the action takes place; but a large portion of the back wall is cut out to overlook an abstract background, thus making the setting look simultaneously particularized and general.  Renée Brode’s lighting, primarily a realistic reflection of the various times of day in the action, will suddenly shift to highlight significant events. 

Michael Spencer-Davis is the best Christie Mahon I have seen.  He achieves the difficult task of investing this weakling-made-hero with an amazing intensity.  This allows Christie’s revolt against his not-so-dead father to arise naturally from his character rather than seeming like an abrupt plot twist.  Having no whiff of a dashing air about him and making sure that none appears, Spencer-Davis makes clear what is so often lost in other productions that Christie is a neutral template onto which the townspeople of this village in County Mayo have projected their desire for adventure and longing for the extraordinary.  A major source of humour in the play is the disparity between the grandiose view the people have of Christie and the fearful, inexperienced young man we see before us.  Beattie and Spencer-Davis maintain this disparity well into the final act, and this pays the greatest dividend in making the relations between Christie and all the other characters absolutely clear.

Kim Horsman’s is also the most sympathetic portrayal of Widow Quin I have seen.  She shuns all caricature of the widow as a scheming, licentious woman, and instead gives her a desperation and intensity to match Christie’s.  Her character has been ostracized for having killed her husband, the main story-teller of the village.  Horsman makes clear that it is the widow’s profound loneliness that makes her use whatever means necessary to attract Christie, another outsider.  When she sees that he can’t be turned from his love for Pegeen, her sorrow is devastating. 

Neil Barclay also shuns caricature in the role of Shawn Keogh, Pegeen’s cowardly cousin who so desperately wants to marry her.  He makes Keogh a young man, aware of his various flaws, who doesn’t want his one chance at happiness to escape.  As Pegeen Mike, Krista Jackson gives an adequate performance but not one with the same degree of nuance or intensity as those of the other three principals.  Pegeen, a tavern keeper’s daughter,  is supposed to be a tough young woman, scornful of the weakness she sees in the men around her.  She refers to herself as “the fright of seven townlands for my biting tongue”.  The irony of her life should be that by falling in love with Christie, she falls harder than anyone else in the village for what is only an illusion not a reality.  Jackson, unfortunately, does not sufficiently establish Pegeen’s toughness or suggest the contradictory emotions Pegeen must feel once she has fallen in love for the first time and with someone she hardly knows. 

Ian Deakin and William Fisher turn in richly comic performances as the play’s two fathers.  Deakin as Pegeen’s father, hilarious when tipsy, believes anything he can’t fathom is “God’s will”.  Fisher gives an appropriately menacing performance as Christie’s seemingly indestructible father, who, however threatening, is nearly led to believe he’s a lunatic. 

As two habitués of the pub Matt Lancaster and David Kirby do not create especially individual characters.  In contrast, Melissa Mae Lloyd, Melissa Good and Carolyn Campbell, as girls from a neighbouring village, give the finest group performance I’ve seen in a long time, functioning, with the precision of their responses, as almost a kind of comic Greek chorus. 

Looking back at Touchmark’s first two seasons, all three plays presented have been characterized by the kind of meticulous productions and intelligent, insightful direction we might expect to see in the best work at Ontario’s major theatre festivals.  Thanks to Touchmark, we don’t have to wait until summer for great theatre.  I very much look forward to their next season.

Photo: Michael Spencer-Davis and Krista Jackson. ©2001 Doug Marr.