Czech Books An Irish classic at home in Prague
When John Millington Synge’s masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World was first performed in Dublin in 1907, there were riots in protest. The black comedy with its tale of attempted patricide was seen as going beyond the limits of decency, and was even accused of putting the Irish nation into disrepute. Set in an isolated and poor rural community, Synge’s play relishes the wealth of western Irish dialect, and today is universally acknowledged as one of the classics of Irish drama. But what does that have to do with the Czech Republic? In this programme, we tell the fascinating story of how The Playboy of the Western World also came to be a Czech classic.
Ondřej Pilný, photo: David Vaughan
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