3.5 stars, rounding up to 4. This is a really quite interesting play about two blind beggars who are cured by the intervention of a saint, and discover that living as sighted people isn't so very wonderful after all. I don't want to spoil the plot for anyone who hasn't read it yet, but it is blindingly obvious from the very first. Blindingly... (pun unintended). Yet the plot isn't really the interesting thing here. Synge does a lot with the ideas of sightedness and choosing what to see and not-see, and it works on multiple levels. On some, even, that he probably didn't intend.

There's a lengthy introduction by Nicholas Grene in this edition, for instance, which has quite a harsh view of Molly, a young woman who is genuinely rather contemptuous of Martin and Mary, the old blind couple. (She's not the only one - most of the characters here are rather unpleasant, and I'm not excepting Martin and Mary.) But Grene clearly misses any potential feminist reading of this, in which Molly has agency enough to look for herself instead of just being an object to look at. Just because Martin has regained his sight and finds her pretty doesn't mean she should run off with him - but Martin doesn't see it that way, because only his vision matters, and the idea that a pretty young girl doesn't see an old and ugly man as equally attractive absolutely refuses to occur to him - unlike Grene, I've no sympathy for him post-rejection.

But although it can be read that way, this isn't really a feminist text - it could far more easily be read as an attack on religion or capitalism, for instance. As I said, it works on multiple levels, and underlying all is a really bitter, black humour. You find yourself laughing when you know you really shouldn't, because some of the things that happen are awful, really genuinely unkind, but still. Horrified laughter. It's much more entertaining than Synge's Playboy of the Western World, which I also read recently and which is supposed to be his masterpiece.