Riders to the Sea

It was first performed on 25 February 1904 at the Molesworth Hall, Dublin, by the Irish National Theater Society with Helen Laird playing Maurya.

The plot is based not on the traditional conflict of human wills but on the hopeless struggle of a people against the impersonal but relentless cruelty of the sea.

As the play begins Nora and Cathleen receive word from the priest that a body, which may be their brother Michael, has washed up on shore in County Donegal, on the Irish mainland north of their home island of Inishmaan.

Maurya predicts that by nightfall she will have no living sons, and her daughters chide her for sending Bartley off with an ill word.

I'll have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won't care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening.

Following his dismissal of Christianity, Synge found that the predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland still retained many of the folktales and superstitions born out of the old Celtic paganism.

This play is an examination of that idea as he has a set of deeply religious characters who find themselves at odds with an unbeatable force of nature (this being the sea).

While the family is clearly Catholic, they still find themselves wary of the supernatural characteristics of natural elements, an idea very present in Celtic paganism.