The secret of the play's power is its capacity for standing afar off, and mingling, if we
may say so, sympathy with relentlessness. There is a wonderful beauty of speech in the
words of every character, wherein the latent power of suggestion is almost unlimited. "In
the big world the old people do be leaving things after them for their sons and children,
but in this place it is the young men do be leaving things behind for them that do be old."
In the quavering rhythm of these words, there is poignantly present that quality of
strangeness and remoteness in beauty which, as we are coming to realise, is the
touchstone of Celtic literary art. However, the very asceticism of the play has begotten a
corresponding power which lifts Synge's work far out of the current of the Irish literary
revival, and sets it high in a timeless atmosphere of universal action.
Its characters live and die. It is their virtue in life to be lonely, and none but the lonely
man in tragedy may be great. He dies, and then it is the virtue in life of the women
mothers and wives and sisters to be great in their loneliness, great as Maurya, the stricken
mother, is great in her final word.
"Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the grace of the Almighty God. Bartley
will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. What more can
we want than that? No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied." The
pity and the terror of it all have brought a great peace, the peace that passeth
understanding, and it is because the play holds this timeless peace after the storm which
has bowed down every character, that "Riders to the Sea" may rightly take its place as the
greatest modern tragedy in the English tongue.
EDWARD J. O'BRIEN.
February 23, 1911.
First performed at the Molesworth Hall, Dublin, February 25th, 1904.
MAURYA (an old woman) . . . Honor Lavelle
BARTLEY (her son) . . . . . W. G. Fay
CATHLEEN (her daughter). . . Sarah Allgood
NORA (a younger daughter). . Emma Vernon
MEN AND WOMEN
SCENE. -- An Island off the West of Ireland. (Cottage kitchen, with nets, oil-skins,
spinning wheel, some new boards standing by the wall, etc. Cathleen, a girl of about
twenty, finishes kneading cake, and puts it down in the pot-oven by the fire; then wipes
her hands, and begins to spin at the wheel. NORA, a young girl, puts her head in at the
door.)
