‘Riders to the Sea’

Riders to the Sea, Synge’s first play, is an astonishingly mature work of art. Whether we regard it as literature or as drama (a distinction Synge liked to make), it is a masterpiece enjoyed equally in the library or in the theatre; the role of Maurya has a special cachet for actresses like that attached to playing Medea or Lady Macbeth or Hedda Gabler. Like all great works of art it defies definition, seeming inexhaustible in meaning and complexity. The plot is simplicity itself. Maurya, an old woman, hopes that the body of her son, Michael, will be washed ashore. He was drowned nine days earlier. Already Maurya has lost her husband, her father-in-law and four other sons to the sea. When the play opens her two daughters have been given clothes from the body of a drowned man. Before they can discover whether the clothes are Michael’s, Bartley, the youngest son, enters preparing for a journey by sea to the Galway horse-fair. Despite the entreaties of his mother not to go, he sets off. ‘He’s gone now, God spare us,’ his mother cries, ‘and we’ll not see him again.’