Singing Synge The Abbey’s sonorous Playboy BY CAROLYN CLAY
	The Playboy of the Western World By J.M. Synge. Directed by Ben Barnes. Set by Guido Tondino. Costumes by Monica Frawley. Lighting by Peter Mumford. Sound and original music by Joe Townsend. Movement director Caimin Collins. With Simon O’Gorman, Cathy Belton, Andrew Bennett, John Olohan, David Herlihy, Brendan Conroy, Tom Vaughan Lawlor, Olwen Fouéré, Ciara O’Callaghan, Katy Davis, Kelly Campbell, and Maeliosa Stafford. Presented by the Abbey Theatre at the Wilbur Theatre through November 21.

Long before Martin McDonagh got hold of it, "the lonesome west" of Ireland was the dramaturgical bailiwick of John Millington Synge. Savagery and poetry forking its tongue, this rainy, rocky, remote part of the world epitomized for the playwright the wild and poetic spirit of the Irish peasantry — as we hear from the horse’s mouth in the Abbey Theatre production of The Playboy of the Western World now on view at the Wilbur Theatre. Director Ben Barnes brings on stage the Beckettesque character of the Bellman, who recites most of the author’s exculpatory preface to the play, in which he salutes an Irish "popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent and tender" before launching a play that, in its original 1907 incarnation, was regarded by nationalists and moralists alike as more of a grenade than a nosegay. The Playboy is no longer shocking — though if you think about it, its portrayal of patricide as a gateway to celebrity probably should be. But its impossibly lyrical evocation of primitive humanity still resonates, and here is a rare chance to hear those lilting cadences roll from the Irish mouths that are their natural habitat.

This Abbey Playboy is not the revelatory firestorm that was its Medea, which Broadway in Boston, in association with the Huntington Theatre Company, brought us two years ago. It is, however, a sturdy and artful rendering of a classic that has lost little but its ability to start a riot. The production, whose six-city American tour is part of the legendary (if financially fraying) Abbey’s 100th-anniversary celebrations, gets its arms around the play’s brawling comedy, its sad sexual politics, and its posturing brutality ebbing toward bereavement.

If the stylized Bellman, with his clanging cymbals, is a bit precious, the staging offers a striking visual concept. On a mostly bare stage, two tall putty-crusted walls form a sort of battlement to the bottle-capped tops of which the cast can ascend on ladders to watch the play’s public triumphs and humiliations. Or the walls, with their shimmering crowns of jugged alcohol, can come together to enclose the naturalistic heart of the play: the spare public house in the middle of some coastal County Mayo no-place where limping, sniveling Christy Mahon reinvents himself as a sexually charged and bare-chested "playboy of the Western world," only to dissolve again after the blow of a loy has taught the local rabble the difference between "a gallous story and a dirty deed" and romantically roused barmaid Pegeen Mike has mercilessly participated in killing her own dream.

Christy arrives on a dark night, dirty as Peanuts’ Pigpen and cowering beneath a grubby shawl, "a poor orphaned traveler, has a prison behind him, and hanging before, and hell’s gap gaping below." He has murdered his abusive father, he says, splitting him from hard head to breeches belt with a loy (a narrow spade). Publican Michael John Flaherty has a wake date with a barrel of poteen, and local farmer Shawn Keogh, the last-ditch fiancé of Pegeen Mike, is too timid and God-fearing to offer protection in his absence. So the daring fellow who bopped his dad is hired as pot boy and holder of danger from the door. By the time word spreads to the shrewd Widow Quin and a trio of bare-legged village girls, Christy’s tale has grown like Topsy, and Pegeen Mike is hard-pressed to shield her treasure from a bevy of sexual predators keener than if they’d spotted McDonald’s in the midst of a potato famine.

Barnes’s solidly acted staging not only opens up the play’s public vista, offering spirited choreography for the play’s usually unseen sport competition and an almost rodeo-like capture of Christy but also provides in the shenanigans of John Olohan’s frisky Michael James and David Herlihy’s Jimmy and Brendan Conroy’s Philly some archetypal drunkenness. The production also makes palpable the sexual competition for Christy — in the cleaned-up person of Tom Vaughan Lawlor a clownishly cocky rube-turned-hero who is nonetheless confident and inspired in his heated, honey-tongued courtship of Pegeen Mike. Cathy Belton, her housedress worn and her hair an unkempt tumble of blond curls, is a feisty, then a fierce, Pegeen Mike, alone at the end as an antiquated light fixture descends like the weight of loss. And though the enthused trio of village girls seem at once innocent and feral, Olwen Fouéré’s Widow Quin is no old prune looking for a farm hand. Dressed like a frontier hombre and exuding a smart, weathered attractiveness, she’s both the manliest and the sexiest thing on stage. She could as easily pose for Hefner’s Playboy as act in Synge’s.