The First Pegeen review: Sad forbidden romance in the Celtic Twilight

In this biographical drama about the Abbey Theatre star, Molly Allgood attends the funeral of her lover John Millington Synge from a distance. Photo: Futoshi Sakauchi

Bewley's Café Theatre @ The Irish Georgian Society, Dublin

★ ★ ★ ★ 

In John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World the bright, acerbic bartender Pegeen Mike isn’t one to be fooled for long. Trapped in a wasteland version of Mayo, surrounded by idiots, she eventually sees through the attractive lies spun by a beloved visitor from out of town. If you’re to believe the body-swapping terms use to describe the art of acting, how an actor “steps into the shoes of someone else,” then the actor who originated the role of Pegeen Mike was no fool either. 

The First Pegeen, Bewley’s Café Theatre’s biographical drama about the Abbey Theatre star Molly Allgood, could easily be a lunchtime play full of historical interest and little else. An opportunity to see run-ins with the celebrities of the Celtic Twilight. Instead, George O’Brien’s script tells a story that is more intimate, largely revolving around Molly and her dying fiancé John Millington Synge.

On the day of John’s funeral, Molly (Aisling O’Mara) watches the burial from a distance. She does fiendish impersonations of the mourners in attendance - including Lady Gregory and Molly’s actor sister Sara Allgood - as uptight, conservative and easily scandalised by the thought of a city centre-raised Catholic showing up at the graveside of her aristocratic Protestant lover. 

The play allows O’Mara’s Molly to poke fun at such puritans, to ridicule family and contemporaries. But most complex and frustrating is John himself, whose idea of a romantic gesture is a chilling forest walk.

This daft contradiction is brilliantly played up by O’Mara, whose Molly desires greater comforts and excellence, to leave the bleak plays of the Abbey Theatre for the elegant worlds of Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw. A popular, outgoing figure easily rousing the jealousies of her stoic partner, these are the zingy flavours of a romantic drama. 

Having scoured historical sources, O’Brien’s script fits in a lot of cameos from the Abbey Theatre’s early years, so much so that parts of it can read like entries from an encyclopaedia. But the play doesn’t lose focus of its most important characters. In one gorgeous scene John’s mother, a frosty picture of disapproval, melts into a friendly mother-in-law to be. 

Director Michael James Ford’s supple production is similarly changeable, a fun satire of disapproving prudes that can also approach tender scenes at a dying man’s sickbed.

Towards the end Molly, her future family sadly gone, turns to preparing John’s final play Deirdre of the Sorrows for production, its intensely romantic lines read aloud with fresh meaning. You can’t experience sorrow without knowing the joy that’s out there. 

Until Aug 29th.