Peg of my heart

This is set to become the year of the three Playboys. A revival of Synge's great comedy is already playing in the Royal National Theatre. There is to be a new experimental production at the Peacock Theatre in July, involving Mikel Murfi, directed by Niall Henry of Sligo's Blue Raincoat Theatre Company. And, towards the end of the year, Garry Hynes is due to start off her long-heralded Synge project, a staging of all Synge's plays by Druid Theatre Company, a return to the work Hynes so famously directed in the 1980s.

There will be much to watch out for in these parallel versions of The Playboy: how the direction is re-conceived in each case, how Christy Mahon himself struts his stuff. But what of the woman he leaves behind him? What are the possibilities for playing Pegeen Mike?

"You don't know," wrote Synge to his fiance, Molly Algood, in the wake of the riotous first production of The Play- boy, "how much I admire the way you are playing P. Mike in spite of all the row." It certainly was not the reception any actor would have wanted in her first leading role. Maire O'Neill (Molly's stage name) had played in Synge's plays before, but Pegeen Mike had been specially written for her - the 20-yearold publican's daughter for the barely 20-year-old novice actress. The one photograph surviving of her in the part suggests she played it with considerable spirit. Indeed, Synge may have drawn from life in creating Pegeen's storms of temper: from his almost daily letters to Molly while he was writing the play, and her abusive scribbled comments on some of them, it is clear that the quarrels between them could be of Playboy-like fierceness.

Molly was in and out of the Abbey company after Synge's death, in 1909, but Pegeen Mike remained a favourite part with her. She called her daughter Pegeen, and had returned to the role in the Abbey by 1918. By the 1920s her older sister, Sara, had taken on the part, even though she must have been over 40 at the time, and was already starring as O'Casey's middle-aged Juno. As the Abbey tradition was for a standard part in the repertoire to remain the standard property of one performer, Eileen Crowe was in possession of Pegeen for many years. Between 1941 and 1953, the part belonged to Brid Lynch.

Pegeen Mike, however, is by rights a young woman's role, the Irish theatre's equivalent to the Shakespearean Juliet. The difference with Pegeen is that a lovely face and figure, good stage presence and delivery, are not enough to get by. With Synge's character there has to be also the capacity for anger, for aggression, for violence. Think of how many of Pegeen's key moments in the play are violent ones: her extortion of Christy's initial confession by threatening to break his head with the butt of a broom, her burning of his leg with a lighted sod of turf, the last box of the ears delivered to Shawn Keogh. There are many ways of reading this for a performer, but it is worth noticing that Pegeen, like Christy, has grown up motherless . Where he has been bullied and browbeaten, she has had to take on a prematurely managing role with her easy-going drunken father; running a shebeen in the wilds of Mayo, she has had to learn how to "knock the head of any two men in the place".

Whatever its sources, a capacity for rage has to be within the range of the actor playing Pegeen. This was what was so completely lacking in Siobhan McKenna's performance in the 1962 film, where she played opposite a conventionally handsome Gary Raymond as Christy. The film as a whole was an exercise in the Irish picturesque, the scenes shot on the Dingle peninsula artfully alternating between Paul Henry and Jack Yeats, Pegeen perfectly coiffed and dressed in a beautiful red flannel dress, the "shebeen" a pre-incarnation of the export Irish pub. McKenna's was a strangely wooden and one-noted performance, the winsome colleen throughout, varying only from a mild flirtatiousness to the plangent melancholy of the famous last lines. This Pegeen was not called upon to do anything so shocking as burn Christy's leg.

Susan Fleetwood, the English Pegeen of the 1975 National Theatre production, used her height to forceful effect, at times seeming to tower over Stephen Rea as Christy. Still the conception remained a romantic one. As Robert Cushman put it, reviewing the production for the Observer, "Miss Fleetwood is a beautiful dreamer. Lying barefoot before the fire at curtainrise she spells out an order for bridal clothes with the languorous longing of a self-appointed fairy princess". It was all this that Brid Brennan in Garry Hynes's Druid production so strikingly changed.

The opening sequence established the naturalistic idiom: a slatternly Pegeen Mike moved slowly about the tiny shebeen preparing to write her letter. A first nib broke as she began, and she had to go back to hunt for a second; when she did get going, each word of the ordering of her trousseau was spelled out at the halting speed of the only just literate. No fairy princess this, she broke off in her writing to scratch at what was evidently a flea-bite. This was the Pegeen of Widow Quin's later description: "a girl you'd see itching and scratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling in the shop".

There was a continual fretful irritability in Brennan's opening characterisation, as though afflicted by some sort of ulcer of discontent that left her temper constantly flaring: at Shawn, at her father, at everything and everyone around her. Her features were sharp with indignation, contempt and derision. And yet, in the still moments of her encounters with Christy, the face could express the deeply vulnerable innocence of the 20year-old young woman.

It was this that made so moving her surprise on discovering her capacity for love: "And to think it's me speaking sweetly, Christy Mahon, and I the fright of seven townlands for my biting tongue. Well, the heart's a wonder". And it was this same vulnerability that left her feeling so humiliatingly exposed when Christy's story of his father was shown to be false. One could only conclude with the Widow Quin: "It's a terror to be aged a score".

In Fiona Buffini's current production at the National, Derbhle Crotty follows Brid Brennan's lead in the slow realism of the opening letter-writing sequence. She even elaborates on the business of the scratching, by having the order of "a fine-toothed comb", among the letter's list of necessaries, prompted by the discovery of a nit in her hair.

But her Pegeen is much less cross than Brennan's. Before the arrival of Christy she is coolly controlled, with an indifference suggestive even of depression. The presence of the playboy rouses her to life and excitement, and it is the recognition of the state to which she is doomed to return that animates her playing of the last scene.

As she hits Shawn his box on the ear, she is convulsed with an almost retching grief. The concluding line itself is torn from her in the midst of sobs that continue on in the final fade into darkness. Some reviewers felt the effect was over the top, but never before has the play been staged so definitively as the tragedy of Pegeen rather than as the triumph of Christy.

With two more major productions of the Playboy to go this year, it will be interesting to see what kind of Pegeen Mike we'll get.

Nicholas Grene is the head of the English department at Trinity College, Dublin, and the author of The Politics of Irish Drama.