Arts Week with Judy Murphy
People kept saying ‘you can’t do this to Synge’,” says Justin McCarthy with a laugh, as he explains the background to The Playboy of the Western World – the Radio Musical, an award-winning work which he co-wrote with fellow Connemara resident, the actor and director Diarmuid de Faoite.
Justin – whose background is in directing for television – and Diarmuid first got the idea to develop a music version of Synge’s classic more than two and a half years ago but couldn’t find any theatre company willing to take on the risk. So, they re-imagined it as a radio play and approached RTÉ’s head of drama, Kevin Reynolds, who loved it. The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland also came on board.
The Playboy of the Western World – the Radio Musical was broadcast last December on RTÉ Radio and won a silver award at this year’s annual PPI Radio Awards in Kilkenny, adding to the bronze which it won at New York Festival’s Best Radio Program Award.
Now it’s returning – in a stage version – and will play the Town Hall Theatre from November 8-12. That follows its outing at An Taibhdhearc in April when it was staged for one night as part of the Cúirt Festival of Literature.
“What happened in An Taibhdhearc was special and had to be repeated,” says Justin, who is responsible for most of music in The Playboy of the Western World – the Radio Musical.
The stage adaptation of the work is set in a radio studio in 1959, complete with a narrator, an acting troupe, a band, backing singers and live sound effects.
Synge’s language is so lyrical that it was ideal for a musical adaptation, Justin says. “You occasionally have to move words around to make them scan better, but it works brilliantly. Remember, Synge was a musician before he was a playwright and you can hear that in the original.”
As the two men adapted it, Justin learned a great deal from Diarmuid de Faoite who “sees everything theatrically and would say, ‘we need to do this to get from this scene to this scene’. But Justin did his own research too, reading George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion and comparing it forensically to the musical version, My Fair Lady. Similarly, he sat through Rogers and Hammerstein musicals, exploring the devices they’d used to introduce song into their lauded films.
The musical version of Playboy is faithful to Synge’s original in terms of characters, but many of them are now based on rock & roll icons.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
