John Millington Synge - Legacy

Legacy

Synge's plays helped set the Abbey house style for the following four decades. The stylised realism of his writing was reflected in the training given at the theatre's school of acting, and plays of peasant life were the main staple of the repertoire until the end of the 1950s. Sean O'Casey, the next major dramatist to write for the Abbey, knew Synge's work well and attempted to do for the Dublin working classes what his predecessor had done for the rural poor. However, O'Casey was not the only playwright that Synge influenced; Brendan Behan, Paul Vincent Carroll, Brinsley MacNamara, and Lennox Robinson were all indebted to Synge.

The critic Vivian Mercier was amongst the first to recognise Samuel Beckett's debt to Synge. Beckett was a regular audience member at the Abbey in his youth and particularly admired the plays of Yeats, Synge and O'Casey. Mercier points out parallels between Synge's casts of tramps, beggars and peasants and many of the figures in Beckett's novels and dramatic works.

In recent years, Synge's cottage on the Aran Islands has been restored as a tourist attraction. An annual Synge Summer School has been held every summer since 1991 in the village of Rathdrum in Wicklow.

Joseph O'Connor has written a novel, Ghost Light, loosely based on Synge's relationship with Molly Allgood. It was published on 3 June 2010.