Inis Nua Theatre’s ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ reimagines Irish classic with a modern twist

Inis Nua Theatre Company’s ‘The Playboy of the Western World‘ presents an old classic with a modern twist. 

And that is precisely how Artistic Director KC MacMillan sought to re-tell Irish playwright John Millington Synge’s turn-of-the-century murder-mystery classic. 

While keeping the most evocative aspects of Synge’s Irish language prose, this modernized version of ‘The Playboy’ – young Christy Mahon, a man on the run after claiming to have killed his father – is freshly adapted by Nigerian playwright Bisi Adigun and renowned Irish author Roddy Doyle.

Considering the original lyrical play’s vision of questionable anti-heroes, frank amorality and the plain-speaking classes (“a time when the people of Western Ireland felt under-represented politically,” says MacMillan), any version of ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ is at home in the mad, bad present.

To add to their drama, Adigun and Doyle’s 2007 take on ‘Playboy’ makes their overheated protagonist a Nigerian immigrant adrift in the wilds of White Catholic Ireland, right at the same time when Rotimi Adebari, a Nigerian-born refugee, was elected the first Black mayor of Portlaoise, Ireland.

“Like the time of the first iteration, 1907, Adigun and Doyle’s 2007 version and our own at the present, 2024, there was a real romanticizing of the outsider,” says MacMillan of the potency of the ‘Playboy’ . “It’s the rough and tumble of Dublin and the gorgeous lyricism of Nigerian speech.”

As for ‘The Playboy’s staging’s startling reality, nothing is better to reenact a pub setting than to, well, just build a working pub— courtesy of set designer Christopher Haig. Audiences can wee for themselves when ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ runs now through Oct. 13 at The Drake Theater.

“’The Playboy of the Western World’ exists in all its forms, including our adaption, because it does what great classical theater does—it finds the specific in the universal, and the universal in the specific,” says MacMillian. “The original was about a time in Irish history where great revolutionary sentiment existed – when Ireland was getting ready to fight for its independence from England. Now, that’s really specific to a time and a place – and the attitudes within the play are specific too – and yet, how often we are at moments of pivotal change, socially as well as politically. And how often are we looking at a community that feels as if it has been underserved by its leadership, that feels that it has been oppressed – so this new ‘Playboy’ has universal resonance in all that. Our adaptation plays to those themes, those attitudes, and how they hit us in this moment.”

As for Haig – an area favorite who has worked with locals such as Simpatico, InterAct, Philadelphia Theatre Company and beyond – he tucked into the working class, socioeconomic realities of Ireland’s past and present via ‘Playboy’ and found its world-building face in what MacMillan calls “a hyperrealism: transported into Dublin pub life.”

To that end, Haig has created for ‘Playboy’, Inis Nua and The Drake a true-to-life Irish pub set, a character all on its own, complete with working Guinness taps – and no, not for the audience’s consumption. 

“When KC said she wanted a pub, for me, the process started with reading the play, going back to the text and seeing the vivid world that the playwrights created – down to the exits, how things are displayed,” says Haig. “KC said she want fully functioning taps where all of the actors could pull Guinness from, and that excited me, because I’ve never done that in the past for a set’s design… I had to think about that world, and where that bar has been for – what it’s meant to – the characters in this play; its history in Irish heritage. A place born in the 1940s, that maybe went into decline in the 1970s when it got taken over by gangsters, and then hypothesized it had a renovation in the 1990s.”

As for MacMillan, who additionally runs Tiny Dynamite and its A Play, A Pie and A Pint’s floating dramatic productions in Philly and presents theater works upstairs at Fergie’s Pub, the real working bar’s atmosphere appeals to her aesthetic sensibilities.

“I’m all about the myriad ways of how theater doesn’t solely belong in a black box space,” she says. “The theater can be social, and without the usual rules of social behavior. And everybody over 21 at least knows the expectations of a bar – to be able to chat with a stranger and have a good time. Plus, Ireland is a place of great stories and great bar culture, so this goes hand-in-hand on our stages in Philadelphia.”

For more information and tickets, visit inisnuatheatre.org