ENO's 'Riders to the Sea'

By Roy Foster November 29 2008
I said: 'Give up Paris ... Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.' "

Whether WB Yeats really gave his young compatriot JM Synge this advice in 1896, and whether Synge needed it, has been much debated. But Synge certainly returned from a wandering life on the continent, went to the west of Ireland, and absorbed the flavours of life and language immortalised in the plays he wrote before his early death in 1909. Few in number, they have exercised an enormous influence, still echoing through the work of Irish playwrights today.

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