In the Shadow of the Glen

About

Synge's brief one-act (1903) follows Nora Burke, wife of a much older farmer in a Wicklow glen, who finds her husband apparently dead — and discovers that a tramp who arrives is more congenial company than either her husband (who is feigning death) or her young lover. The play's Abbey Theatre premiere caused controversy for its portrayal of Irish marital unhappiness, and Maud Gonne stormed out. At barely twenty minutes it is one of the most compressed comic-tragic plays in the Irish tradition, and the character of the tramp — offering Nora freedom in exchange for uncertainty — gives it genuine philosophical resonance.