The Playboy of the Western World

The action of the play takes place entirely in a country pub near a village on the wild coast of County Mayo in western Ireland. Here live publican Michael Flaherty and his fiery daughter Pegeen. She is being courted by the fat and cowardly Shawn Keogh, whom she despises, and when young Christy Mahon appears with a tale of killing his bullying father with a single mighty blow of his spade, she is fascinated. If feelings are developing between Christy and Pegeen, they are not allowed to mature before others try to turn Christy's head. The village girls find him fascinating too, as does Widow Quin, and Christy becomes the local hero, even winning the village mule race as a true 'playboy of the western world.' However, his credibility is destroyed when his father appears, nursing a fractured skull and telling tales of his miserable puny son. Christy is no longer able to sustain the hopes and dreams that the village has invested in him, and is devastated when he loses Pegeen's love, so much so that he attacks his father a second time. Now the gap opens irrevocably between the 'gallows story' and the 'dirty deed', with the 'dirty deed' all that the community see, and they turn violent towards him. The peasantry, thinking that Christy really has killed his father this time -- and with them all as witnesses -- try to string him up. Pegeen leads them in the effort to bring him to due process of the law. Christy is appalled to see Pegeen turn on him, and she even brands him with a turf ember. But Old Mahon recovers, to Christy's amazement, 'to be killed a third time', and in the end, father and son leave together with considerably more mutual respect, leaving Pegeen to lament in an agony of solitude that she has 'lost the only playboy of the western world.'