Plays, Poems and Prose

J.M. Synge was a controversial figure in the latter of the Irish Literary Revival. Together with W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, he was a founder of the Irish National Theatre Society (later the Abbey Theatre) in the 1890s. His own plays however, with their insistence on the fundamental realities of life, were denounced as immoral and anti-Irish. His great tragi-comedy 'The Playboy of the Western World' caused a riot at its first performance in 1907.

Today Synge's plays continues to disturb and delight us. The theme of the aliented individual challenging and disrupting society's conventions dominates his drama and, as Alison Smith suggests in het introduction, in it powerful blend of naturalism, visionary language of rural life, Synge's work has much in common with modernist literature.