Theatre
J.M.
SYNGE
| J. M. Synge,
Riders
to the Sea,
 Mississauga,
AnthropoMare, 2005, $17CDN;
Catalog
Data : Sable, Georgette, 2005,
Riders to the
Sea / À mer à cheval,
ISBN
2-923072-10-6
|
RIDERS TO THE SEA :
Play (drama) in one act, published as a flip book (one side in English, the other
in French, under the title À
MER À CHEVAL©). At the
very beginning of the twentieth century, on an
Aran island
(Ireland), a mother and two daughters wait for news of their
brother, probably drown at sea. The mother tries to dissuade her
last son from riding to the sea, risking to meet the same fate.
A few decades before FLAHERTY, J. M. SYNGE spent
time on one of the Aran Islands and came back with this
acclaimed play relating the life and the stress of their
inhabitants. A few years later, SYNGE published The Aran
islands, virtually the notes of its logbook, revealing some
of the topics of the play. SYNGE focus the action inside the
living room of a cottage even though FLAHERTY's work focused essentially
on the outside. The two Irish authors, trying to go
back to the last and remote Gaelic roots quickly disappearing
with the twentieth century, compose with the very dramatic and
imposing presence of the omnipresent and surrounding sea. The
French translation made by SABLE, come with numerous
anthropological notes and a short study (the references are mainly
from English publications) of the horse symbolism in the Gaelic
tradition.
read
an excerpt
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