Actor Declan Conlon told David Hennessy about the new revival of The Playboy of the Western World by JM Synge at The National Theatre in London.
A new revival of JM Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World starring Éanna Hardwicke as Christy Mahon is playing at London’s National Theatre.
The story of the Synge classic centres around Christy Mahon who arrives at a pub in Mayo claiming he has killed his father by driving a loy into his head.
While you may think he would be immediately reviled for saying such a thing, the locals view him with curiosity and even hero worship for being bold enough to do what he says he has done.
The publican’s daughter Pegeen, played by Nicola Coughlan of Derry Girls, even falls in love with him.
However the locals have to re-evaluate their opinion of Christy when his father arrives having followed his son and clearly only been wounded by his son’s attack.
Christy goes from being a hero to a liar and coward.
He goes to correct this but misjudges his actions.
Declan Conlon plays Christy’s father, Old Mahon.
The last time The Irish World spoke to Declan he was playing Frank Hardy in Brian Friel’s Faith Healer at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith.
Declan’s screen credits include the Brendan Gleeson film Calvary, Paul Mescal’s God’s Creatures and Clint Eastwood’s Here After.
His work on the London stage includes playing MacDuff in Macbeth at Queens Theatre and Owen McCafferty’s Quietly.
He has just finished a stint at London’s Almeida in Alice Birch’s Romans (A Novel).
This play represents a return to the National Theatre as some of his very earliest stage work was with the Royal Shakespeare Company and then the National.
The play is known for its evocative, poetic use of Hiberno- English.
The cast is completed by Siobhan McSweeney, Lorcan Cranitch, Marty Rea, Megan Cusack, Marty Breen, Naoise Dunbar, Matthew Forrest, Sallay Garnett and Fionnuala Gygax.
Caitríona McLaughlin (Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin) directs.
Faith Healer had long been a play you had admired, is this similar?
“Well, it’s certainly a play that I have long thought is a masterpiece.
“I never really thought about being in it but I do think it’s a brilliant, brilliant piece of writing.
“I think it is Synge’s masterpiece but also the language is so beautiful.”
This is a return for you as you first performed at the National as a young actor, isn’t that right?
“I did.
“I was working it out that the last time I worked there was 25 years ago so it’s lovely to be back.
“When I worked there 25 years ago, I never imagined it would be a quarter century before I came back to do anything there again.”
The National, along with the RSC, came very early for you, didn’t it?
“It was even before I had an agent.
“I don’t know how that happened.
“I ended up working at the RSC and the National, I wasn’t even represented at that time.
“The first time I went to the National was 1996, I think.
“It’s almost 30 years ago so it’s very nice to be back.”
How are rehearsals going?
“It’s lovely.
“They’re a very, very talented bunch of people.
“It’s my first time working with Caitríona which is lovely as well.
“I just finished something at the Almeida before I started this and I was playing eight characters in that play so that was a fairly heavy workload whereas this, I play one part and I’m only in the second half of the play. It’s much more manageable.”
You say you’re only in the second half but your character’s presence is there throughout..
“Yes, it is.
“He is there throughout.
“He gets a good setup from Christy describing what a horror he is.
“It’s been interesting working on that part.
“Depending on whose perspective you take, he’s a hard man, he’s a tough man, he’s unsentimental.
“He’s probably been fairly brutal to Christy over the years, just the two of them in the little house.
“I imagine that they’re really struggling.
“They’re living on a little patch of land and in a little stone hut and I think they’re on their uppers trying to scratch a living on a tiny piece of ground like people might have been doing at the time.
“Otherwise he would never have been able to trek ten days chasing his son across the country if he had any kind of a farm really.
“You wouldn’t be leaving your animals behind so I think it’s interesting.
“I think the father’s got that terrible Irish disease which still exists today but certainly was very prevalent when I was young, which is shame.
“Christy isn’t a natural labourer, he’s more of an artistic sort of temperament.
“The father describes him disparagingly as somebody who likes lying in the grass getting a tan on his belly in the sun and he wouldn’t work properly.
“When he makes a haystack, it’s like the stalk of a rush, the thing would blow over for nothing.
“And when he’s driving their last cow, he broke the cow’s leg at the hip.
“He thinks he’s useless.
“He said he’s not able to work.
“Because of his slightly dreamy head, I think the father thinks he’s a bit effeminate and therefore is kind of ashamed of him and so brutal to him, beats him and abuses him.
“Tells him he’s useless and tells him he’s ugly and tells him he’s this, that and the other.
“And on the one hand, it’s out of shame and on the other hand, it’s probably realising, ‘How will he ever survive when I’m gone? How will he ever survive if he doesn’t get himself together?’
“Tough love.
“But clearly he pushes Christy to breaking point.
“He takes a swing at him with the loy.”
You must be working very closely with Éanna Hardwicke to create that whole father/ son dynamic..
“Yeah, it’s lovely.
“He’s a very open, very talented man.
“I mean his career is going great guns but he’s a very open, hard working, curious actor.
“He wants us to dig down into our past and we’ve had many a conversation about that since we started rehearsal trying to build a back history which you do as an actor.
“It won’t be seen on the stage necessarily but we have an understanding, we’ve made a common history for ourselves.
“Because Christy talks about his past in a certain way in front of the women when he arrives in the pub.
“Part of the rehearsal has been trying to decide how much of what anybody says is true.
“Is he just blackguarding the father to the other people or are some of the events that he describes true?
“He describes the father wanting him to marry an old widow from across the hill who’s 45 and 200 stone and fat and ugly and has one tooth and all of this.
“So we’ve been trying to build a backstory.
“He also talks about the fact that I have kids roaming the world who never come back and have never contacted me.
“We’re trying to figure out, because clearly there’s only the two of us left in the house, was there other siblings that couldn’t take it and left as soon as they were able and never came back and never sent anything home?
“We’ve been trying to build our backstory together which is always very interesting.”
Is that a commonality between this piece and Faith Healer, that you get differing stories from different characters?
“Yeah, it is interesting.
“Faith Healer is a much more clear cut example of memory being very subjective.
“And Friel does that with each character in Faith Healer describing similar events but from a completely different perspective and contradicting each other.
“Because this is a comedy, there is a heightened series of descriptions of things but, as far as I can see, it’s really only Christy and Mahon that do that.
“I think everybody else pretty much speaks what we can take fairly solidly as just the truth.
“It’s just trying to build the story through the two men.
“Because of their feelings about each other and the fact that they’re disparaging about each other, we have to kind of decide (what is true).
“And because Christy is able to reinvent himself.
“He discovers in the course of the play that he has the gift of the imagination and he’s able to weave stories and he’s able to use language in a way that I don’t think he even understood he was able to do until he goes to the pub, because they’re spellbound.
“Pegeen is (spellbound) by his poetry, the poetry of his descriptions and the poetry of the way he speaks.
“And in a way, Old Mahon has a touch of that as well.
“These two are Kerry men.
“They’re not Mayo.
“We’ve decided they’re coming up from Kerry, that Christy runs away having done the deed and takes the coastal path up to Mayo over the course of the ten days before he arrives.”
The play also shows in how Christy is lionised and reviled at different times how people have no control over how they’re seen..
“No, exactly.
“I think that’s more of a comment on the village and the villagers than it is on Christy.
“I love the way the play puts under the microscope this kind of mob mentality and that’s a very current thing today.
“We decide who to rise up, we decide to make heroes of people.
“The comedy of course is it is for killing his dad.
“He becomes a hero for killing his dad.
“And then, of course, later on in the play when they see him out the back hit the father on the head again, it just looks like a grubby deed.
“They don’t think he’s a hero the second time he does it, quite the opposite.
“But it’s the mob mentality: That we’ll build you up, we’ll make you into the kind of hero that we want to create and then if you don’t play that game or play that role in the way that we think you should, we’ll tear you to shreds and tear you down again.
“It’s quite an Irish thing, rising people up and then when we decide they’re getting too big for their boots, we’ll knock them down.”
There were riots when it was first staged. Do you talk about the controversy of the piece?
“It’s very interesting in that it’s quite a pagan play.
“There’s talk of Father Reilly because Shawn Keogh mentions Father Reilly at the beginning and how frightened he is of staying the night with Peggy.
“This is before Christy arrives, ‘What would Father Reilly think?’
“I imagine at the time of the Gaelic Revival when we wanted our own culture and those students in Dublin at the time that were involved in the Gaelic League were interested in the Irish mythology and the myth of Cú Chulainn and all of that sort of quite heroic stuff.
“But Synge then writes a bunch of people in a village who are just all too human.
“They’re drinking.
“They love drinking.
“The old man, Michael, who runs the pub is an alcoholic.
“They have a blood lust.
“They like people who are violent.
“Pegeen talks about the heroes gone by who would have attacked a peeler.
“Father Reilly is mentioned but he never appears which I think is interesting.
“Synge never puts the character of the priest in the play.
“He lets the play be and there’s a sense of the pagan in these people.
“They’re very three dimensional, flesh and blood, animalistic sort of characters.
“They have desires and they have a lust for drink and a lust for women.
“And they dance and they fight so I would imagine at the time people might have thought it wasn’t a very flattering portrayal of how we wanted to present ourselves after so many hundreds of years of British rule.
“I think there was kind of a desire to say, ‘There’s the Irish peasant nobility’.
“And Synge, like all good writers, was kind of going, ‘Well, I want to write human beings. Contradictory, complex, full of their own flaws as well as their own virtues’.
“And that didn’t go down too well.
“It’s a bit like O’Casey in a way with The Plough and the Stars.
“He focuses on the ordinary Dublin people who are looting during the rising and you hear the proclamation being read out in the background.
“It caused a riot as well.
“We don’t want to see ourselves as that. That’s not who we are.
“But of course we’re complicated beings, human beings not just Irish people.”
With its dark humour, is it perhaps a real precursor to dark comedies we have now like the work of Martin McDonagh and Marina Carr?
“Yeah, definitely.
“I think that’s right.
“We have to remember as well that he does title the play as a comedy.
“It is funny and I think part of the humour is the way he kind of up ends how we imagine people will react to things like somebody comes in saying they’ve killed their father.
“Immediately they’re in awe of him and think he’s wonderful.
“Nobody’s thinking to call the police.
“That doesn’t enter anybody’s head.
“And there’s a dark humour in that.
“What sort of entertainment was there at the time except stories?
“So anybody coming into the community who has a story to tell or has done a deed that isn’t a normal, everyday run of the mill deed immediately becomes the focus of interest and of attention.”
You are father to Éanna in this production but you played father to his Normal People co-star Paul Mescal in God’s Creatures. What was it like to work with Paul?
“Well, he’s just a delightful, fantastic actor and a very grounded lad.
“His star was obviously on the rise at that time.
“He hadn’t done some of the major things he has subsequently done but he was still very hot property but such an easy, grounded, normal actor.
“I always like when actors have come up in the theatre.
“Paul started off doing theatre.
“I think it kind of grounds people in a way.
“You’re part of a company.
“I think it keeps people’s feet on the ground in a way.”
As we said it was the theatre where you started..
“I’ve done a lot of theatre over the course of my years in the business.
“I love doing theatre, I must say.
“You have more agency in the theatre.
“I like the fact that it happens in real time.
“It begins and you’re on and it ends and then it’s over.
“I like the fact that it’s in front of a live audience.
“I like the fact that once you go on stage, nobody’s kind of stopping a take and saying, ‘We’ll do that again’, or ‘we’ll take that again’.
“And you get to evolve a character over time.
“You also get to do what you don’t often or don’t always get to do when you’re doing either film or television, rehearse.
“You get to work with the actors and that rehearsal is such a gift.
“That’s some of the most enjoyable parts of doing a play, the coming together and collaborating and working things out and trying things and failing and trying something else.
“I have done a lot of theatre and I do love it.
“You realise as you get older, of course, it’s exhausting in a way that you didn’t realise 30 years ago.
“You do need to be fit to do certain plays anyway.”
What does this play say to our modern times?
“I think it is the mob mentality.
“It’s the thing that I would take from it.
“The modern village is Twitter or some of the social networks and you can see how you can whip up a frenzy very quickly and either idolise somebody or destroy somebody.
“The village take on a kind of a personality as they try to create the sort of hero they want.
“Instead of being happy that the father isn’t dead, they’re all so outraged at having given Christy hero status when the father arrives.
“It’s brilliantly black, black humour but I can see a lot of similarities between that story and what happens today, the way a frenzy can be whipped up in either support of something or against something.
“It’s all too common in the kind of polarising politics that we have.
“There are certainly things you could say haven’t changed that much, just the form of delivery has changed with all our technology.”
The Playboy of the Western World is at The National Theatre until 28 February 2026.
For more information, click here.
