His best-known play The Playboy of the Western World was poorly received, due to its bleak ending, depiction of Irish peasants, and idealisation of patricide, leading to hostile audience reactions and riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre, which he had co-founded with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.

Synge came from a wealthy Anglo-Irish background who mainly wrote about working-class Catholics in rural Ireland, and what he saw as the essential paganism of their worldview.

Synge was born on 16 April 1871, in Newtown Villas, Rathfarnham, County Dublin,[1] the youngest of eight children of upper-middle-class Protestant parents.

[1] His father John Hatch Synge was a barrister and came from a family of landed gentry in Glanmore Castle, County Wicklow.

The family moved to the suburb of Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) in 1888, and Synge entered Trinity College, Dublin, the following year.

[15][9] He wrote some pieces of literary criticism for Gonne's Irlande Libre and other journals, as well as unpublished poems and prose in a decadent fin de siècle style.

[19] He visited Lady Gregory's home, at Coole Park near Gort, County Galway, where he met Yeats again and also Edward Martyn.

He spent the following five summers there, collecting stories and folklore, perfecting his Irish, but living in Paris for most of the rest of each year.

[21] During this period he wrote his first play, When the Moon Has Set which he sent to Lady Gregory for the Irish Literary Theatre in 1900, but she rejected it.

[1] Lady Gregory read the manuscript and advised Synge to remove any direct naming of places and to add more folk stories, but he declined to do either because he wanted to create something more realistic.

[26] Riders to the Sea was also attacked by nationalists, this time including Patrick Pearse, who decried it because of the author's attitude to God and religion.

[28] A third one-act play, The Tinker's Wedding, was drafted around this time, but Synge initially made no attempt to have it performed, largely because of a scene in which a priest is tied up in a sack, which, as he wrote to the publisher Elkin Mathews in 1905, would probably upset "a good many of our Dublin friends".

When the Abbey Theatre was established, Synge was appointed literary adviser and became one of the directors, along with Yeats and Lady Gregory.

He differed from Yeats and Lady Gregory on what he believed the Irish theatre should be, as he wrote to Stephen MacKenna:I do not believe in the possibility of "a purely fantastic, unmodern, ideal, breezy, spring-dayish, Cuchulainoid National Theatre" ... no drama can grow out of anything other than the fundamental realities of life, which are never fantastic, are neither modern nor unmodern and, as I see them, rarely spring-dayish, or breezy or Cuchulanoid.

[33] Arthur Griffith, who believed that the Abbey Theatre was insufficiently politically committed, described the play as "a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform",[34] and perceived a slight on the virtue of Irish womanhood in the line "... a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts ..."[35] At the time, a shift was known as a symbol representing Kitty O'Shea and her adulterous relationship with Charles Stuart Parnell.

The first critic to respond to the play was Daniel Corkery, who said, "One is sorry Synge ever wrote so poor a thing, and one fails to understand why it ever should have been staged anywhere".

[49] Richard Ellmann, the biographer of Yeats and James Joyce, stated that Synge "built a fantastic drama out of Irish life.

[52] While Yeats and Lady Gregory were "the centrepieces of the Irish theatrical renaissance, it was Synge ... who gave the movement its national quality ..."[53] His plays helped set the dominant style at the Abbey Theatre until the 1940s.

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.

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.

Joseph O'Connor wrote a novel, Ghost Light (2010), loosely based on Synge's relationship with Molly Allgood.