“My play has made practically no headway since, as I have been down for ten days with bronchitis. My lung is not touched, however, and I have got off well considering. I hope I shall be all right by next week.”
[About the same date.]: “I am pleased with the way my play is going, but I find it is quite impossible to rush through with it now, so I rather think I shall take it and the typewriter to some place in Kerry where I could work. By doing so, I will get some sort of holiday and still avoid dropping the play again, which is a rather dangerous process. If I do this, I will be beyond posts.... If I do not get a good summer, I generally pay for it in the winter in extra bouts of influenza and all its miseries.”
“August 12, ’06. I shall be very glad, thanks, to go down and read you my play (The Playboy), if it is finished in time, but there is still a great deal to do. I have had a very steady week’s work since last Sunday and have made good way, but my head is getting very tired. Working in hot weather takes a lot out of me.”
“November 25, ’06. I have had rather a worse attack than I expected when I wrote my last note, but I am much better now, and out as usual. One of my lungs, however, has been a little touched, so I shall have to be careful for a while. Would it be possible to put off The Playboy for a couple of weeks? I am afraid if I went to work at him again now, and then rehearsed all December, I would be very likely to knock up badly before I was done with him. My doctor says I may do so if it is necessary, but he advises me to take a couple of weeks’ rest if it can be managed. That cousin of mine who etches is over here now, and he wants me to stay with him for a fortnight in a sort of country house he has in Surrey; so if you think The Playboy can be put off, I will go across on Thursday or Friday and get back in time to see The Shadowy Waters and get The Playboy under way for January. What do you think? If so, I would like to read the third act of Playboy to you before I go, and then make final changes while I am away, as I shall have a quiet time.”
He worked very hard at The Playboy, altering it a good deal as he went on. He had first planned the opening act in the ploughed field, where the quarrel between Christy and his father took place. But when he thought of the actual stage, he could not see any possible side wings for that “wide, windy corner of high distant hills.” He had also thought that the scene of the return of the father should be at the very door of the chapel where Christy was to wed Pegeen. But in the end all took place within the one cottage room. We all tried at that time to write our plays so as to require as little scene-shifting as possible for the sake of economy of scenery and of stage hands.
In October, 1906, Synge wrote to Mr. Yeats: “My play, though in its last agony, is not finished, and I cannot promise it for any definite day. It is more than likely that when I read it to you and Fay, there will be little things to alter that have escaped me, and with my stuff it takes time to get even half a page of new dialogue fully into key with what goes before it. The play, I think, will be one of the longest we have done, and in places extremely difficult. If we said the 19th, I could only have six or seven full rehearsals, which would not, I am quite sure, be enough. I am very sorry, but what is to be done?”
Then he wrote to me in November: “May I read The Playboy to you and Yeats and Fay, some time to-morrow, Saturday, or Monday, according as it suits you all? A little verbal correction is still necessary, and one or two structural points may need—I fancy do need—revision, but I would like to have your opinions on it before I go any further.”
I remember his bringing the play to us in Dublin, but he was too hoarse to read it, and it was read by Mr. Fay. We were almost bewildered by its abundance and fantasy, but we felt, and Mr. Yeats said very plainly, that there was far too much “bad language.” There were too many violent oaths, and the play itself was marred by this. I did not think it was fit to be put on the stage without cutting. It was agreed that it should be cut in rehearsal. A fortnight before its production, Mr. Yeats, thinking I had seen a rehearsal, wrote: “I would like to know how you thought The Playboy acted.... Have they cleared many of the objectionable sentences out of it?” I did not, however, see a rehearsal and did not hear the play again until the night of its production, and then I told Synge that the cuts were not enough, that many more should be made. He gave me leave to do this, and, in consultation with the players, I took out many phrases which, though in the printed book, have never since that first production been spoken on our stage. I am sorry they were not taken out before it had been played at all, but that is just what happened.
On Saturday, January 26, 1907, I found a note from Synge on my arrival in Dublin: “I do not know how things will go to-night. The day company are all very steady but some of the outsiders in a most deplorable state of uncertainty.... I have a sort of second edition of influenza and I am looking gloomily at everything. Fay has worked very hard all through, and everything has gone smoothly.”