‘The Well of the Saints’

Synge’s first full-length play, The Well of the Saints, has been received with more enthusiasm by the critics than by audiences, which have preferred Riders to the Sea and The Playboy. It may be that, like the original Abbey players, they find the vision of the play too narrow and intense and the irony too Swiftian in its misanthropy (softened only in the final act). Willie Fay recorded his impression of the play: I realized that every character in the play from the Saint to Timmy the Smith was bad-tempered right through the play, hence, as I pointed out to Synge, all the bad temper would inevitably infect the audience and make them bad-tempered too. I suggested that the Saint anyway might be made into a good-natured, easy- going man, or that Molly Byrne might be made a lovable young girl, but Synge would not budge. He said he wanted to write ‘like a monochrome painting, all in shades of the one colour’.1