And unlike in the work of Molière, the characters’ wit found expression in spite of themselves, rather than through any inherent intelligence. Was this comedy? If so, what kind? Was Synge channeling Molière in his send-up of archetypes and use of sharp-tongued wit? The 1909 audience had never seen peasant archetypes portrayed so unromantically. To understand what is so enduring about the play, it is useful to consider what confused its contemporary audiences. The audience simply had no idea how to classify and interpret what it was watching. Though seemingly grounded in realism, the work's premise is audacious and outlandish, and it ends in a vicious climax and ironic lamentation.

Yet the details of the play's plot, which centers on a man’s personal transformation and public exaltation through his increasingly fictive account of patricide, were arguably less offensive to the audience than the play's ambiguous tone was. To top it all off, the play received almost uniformly terrible reviews in the papers. Indeed, for that week, the Abbey became the place for nationalistic, God-fearing Irishmen to display their outrage and indignation over Synge's unsavory portrait of rural Irish life and values. In fact, the play was in Synge's day a marked failure: the Dublin audience of 1909 jeered and disrupted each performance of the play’s one-week run at the newly minted Abbey Theatre.

Though it is today one of the English-language drama's most widely-anthologized works, it was hardly a success at the time. Synge wrote The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, to be produced at Ireland's Abbey Theatre, which he had helped to form.

Playboy of the western world jm synge