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their narrow political prejudices. She was teaching her grandchildren the Bible as she had taught her children, seeing it as part of her duty, according to Edward Stephens, to emphasize the horror of eternal damnation. ‘Sometimes,’ Stephens wrote,
our lessons were interrupted by his [Synge’s] entering the room. I remember particularly his coming in once when we were having a Bible reading. He was twirling his pocket scissors on his finger chanting softly to himself, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy Moses.’ We greeted him and he sat in the window for a few minutes and then, feeling that he had caused an interruption, went quietly out again. Our grandmother said: ‘Don’t put down your Bibles when Uncle John comes in,’ and resumed her reading.
    In Paris, he was the earnest playboy of the western world; in Kingstown he was his mother’s youngest son.
    Just before Synge’s first visit to the Aran Islands, he had two final meetings with Cherrie Matheson, who told him that their differences were irreconcilable. Two days later, he called to her house and had what must have been a deeply dispiriting conversation with Cherrie and her mother. Mrs Matheson, according to Edward Stephens,
with Cherrie’s approval, rated him soundly for pressing a rejected proposal of marriage when he was not earning enough money to support himself. He left in despair … His mind was still distraught with anguish when, on the morning of Monday 9 May 1898, he left by the morning train for Galway.
    He wrote of his visits to the Islands over the next few years with beauty and reverence and restraint. It must have been a relief that first morning watching the sailors casting off in a fog from Galway pier and arriving in Aranmore after a three-hour journey, no one there knowing anything about Cherrie Matheson and her hectoring mother, or Mrs Synge’s worries about her poor Johnnie. He was now in the land of his dreams. Lady Gregory saw him on the island in 1898; she was in search, too, of nourishment from a primitive world which contained an astonishing life force and an ancient culture. She wrote:
I first saw him in the North Island of Aran. I was staying there, gathering folklore, talking to the people, and felt a real pang of indignation when I passed another outsider walking here and there, talking also to the people. I was jealous of not being alone on the island among the fishers and the seaweed gatherers. I did not speak to the stranger nor was he inclined to speak to me. He also looked on me as an intruder.
    Later, she wrote about his work once he had arrived on the Islands:
He had done no good work until he came back to his own country. It was there that he found all he wanted, fable, emotion, style ... bringing a cultured mind to a mass of primitive material, putting clearer and lasting form to the clumsily expressed emotion of a whole countryside.
    Soon, he was invited to Coole and quickly became part of the movement which resulted in the Abbey Theatre. He became, eventually, with Yeats and Lady Gregory, one of the three directors. He wrote five plays for them – The Shadow of the Glen (1903); Riders to the Sea (1904); The Well of the Saints (1905) The Tinker’s Wedding (1907); The Playboy of the Western World (1907). He left one play unfinished, Deirdre of the Sorrows , which was first produced, in a completed version, in 1910. His imagination was powerfully autonomous; his plays combined the knowledge he had amassed through his study and his wanderings in Europe with a real openness and freedom and an immense natural talent. He delighted in language and character, in wild talk and massive abandon, as though he were concerned to dramatize and most portray what he himself in his own life kept in abeyance.
    In these eleven years he took part in all the rows which ran at the theatre, seeming much of the time calmer, more focused, less vindictive and, on some matters, more determined than his colleagues. He believed that Yeats was too impetuous to