The Playboy of the Western World is like the state opening of parliament. Worth seeing once. Director Caitriona McLaughlin delivers a faithful production of John Millington Synge’s grand satire about dim-witted Oirish peasants and, perhaps unwisely, she spreads the show across the entire length of the vast Lyttelton stage. It looks as if it’s being performed on a railway platform.

The drama consists of several broad, daring and improbable steps. A handsome farmer’s boy, Christy, rolls up in a sleepy village in Co. Mayo and claims to have murdered his father. The lustful local girls treat him as a hero rather than an outlaw and compete for his hand in marriage. When Christy wins a prestigious donkey race he sets the seal on his pluck and manliness.

Then, disaster. His father arrives and accuses Christy of trying and failing to kill him with a shovel. Christy’s exposure as a liar is the moral crux of the piece. The villagers round on him even though his offence is revealed to be the lesser crime of assault rather than murder. And the self-righteous mob turns into a freakish and irrational force of nature and not an instrument of truth or justice.

The story lumbers on from here and delivers a few amusing surprises towards........

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