Why has the National got it in for Oirish peasants?
The Playboy of the Western World is like the state opening of parliament. Worth seeing once. Director Caitriona McLaughlin delivers a faithful production of John Millington Synge’s grand satire about dim-witted Oirish peasants and, perhaps unwisely, she spreads the show across the entire length of the vast Lyttelton stage. It looks as if it’s being performed on a railway platform. The drama consists of several broad, daring and improbable steps. A handsome farmer’s boy, Christy, rolls up in a sleepy village in Co. Mayo and claims to have murdered his father. The lustful local girls treat him as a hero rather than an outlaw and compete for his hand in
