Riders to the Sea

Author: John Millington Synge

Title: “Riders to the Sea” (tragedy in one act)

Editorial: (I do not know because I have downloaded from www.gutenberg.net)

Year and place of publication: on 25 February 1904 in Dublin

Dramatis Personae:

   - Maurya: an old woman, she is Bartley, Cathleen and Nora’s mother. She is worry about what can passé Michael and Bartley. She is tidy to lose persons of her family for the sea. 

   - Bartley: Maurya’s last son, he is pig-headed and insistent.

   - Cathleen: Maurya’s old daughter, she is very worker.

   - Nora: Maurya’s young daughter.

Plot:

   Cathleen and Nora are in the kitchen, the first doing household tasks, the second being quietly with a bundle. It contains some clothes taken from the boy of a drowned man far in the north. Maurya, who has been grieving for her missing son Michael, had fallen in a fitful sleep. When Maurya wakes up, girls hide the bundle, but Maurya discover it and now she is worry about her remaining son Bartley, who wants to cross to the mainland this every day to dispose of a horse in the fair. However, Maurya has fear and insist in he do not go; she had already lost a husband and five sons in the sea.

    Maurya gets angry because her son do not listening her pleas and lets him go without her blessing. The girls persuade her to intercept him with the lunch they had forgotten to give him and so to make opportunity for that blessing a mother should have given.

   While Maurya goes, the girls open the bundle. The Michael's clothes are inside. Their only comfort is the thought his body has been given a good Christian. Suddenly Maurya returns frightened with a vision she had had of Michael riding on the led horse behind Bartley. Now she is sure Bartley will dead. When the girls show her Michael's clothes she responses that the good white boards she had bought for his coffin would serve for Bartley instead.

    Then some women appear some men carrying body of Bartley, while the first are singing an Irish chant of grief. These leave body in a plank and lay it on the table. The play ends with Maurya’s submission: "They're all gone now and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me. . . . No man at all can be living forever and we must be satisfied."

Space and time:

   Play happens inside Maurya’s house, in the kitchen (a closed, rural and simple place), in the

present during one day. However, as “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” it seems us that happened a few years ago.

Recourse:

   Synge has used a few characters, whose three are women and one man, who represented a tragic figure must have the opportunity to fail honourably, and how we or in this case woman and her daughters wish to see him trying to evade his fate.

    In addition, he has shows agony of cannot do anything of the mother for her last song, who wait him a terrible fate.

Opinion:

    A play shows reality; what vulnerable we are and the impotence of cannot do nothing in tragic case, having to accept it or sinking us without solve. The strong we must be in life for surpassing terrible unforeseen and so to follow walking, if it is not for us self at least for the rest go round us.