Preface to Riders to the Sea by J M Synge

[RobC]

I was sorting through some old papers recently, when I came across a photocopy of the preface J M Synge wrote for his 1907 play Riders to the Sea. I like what he says here (and how he says it.) Comments welcome!

The drama is made serious--in the French sense of the word--not by the degree in which it is taken up with problems that are serious in themselves, but by the degree in which it gives the nourishment, not easy to define, on which our imaginations live. We should not go to the theatre as we go to a chemist's, or a dram-shop, but as we go to a dinner, where the food we need is taken with pleasure and excitment. This was nearly always so in Spain and England and France when the drama was at its richest--the infancy and decay of the drama tend to be didactic--but in these days the playhouse is too often stocked with the drugs of many seedy problems, or with the absinthe or vermouth of the last musical comedy.

The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything. Analysts with their problems, and teachers with their systems, are soon as old-fashioned as the pharmacopoeia of Galen--look at Ibsen and the Germans--but the best plays of Ben Johnson and Moliere can no more go out of fashion than the blackberries on the hedges.

Of the things which nourish the imagination humour is one of the most needful, and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it. Baudelaire calls laughter the Satanic element in man; and where a country loses its humour, as some towns in Ireland are doing, there will be morbidity of mind, as Baudelaire's mind was morbid.

In the greater part of Ireland, however, the whole people, from the tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, and view of life, that are rich and genial and humorous. I do not think that these country people, who have so much humour themselves, will mind being laughed at without malice, as the people in every country have been laughed at in their own comedies.

J.M.S.
Dec 2nd 1907