Riders to the Sea

About

Synge's 1904 one-act is one of the most perfectly constructed short plays in the language: an Aran Islands mother, Maurya, has lost husband and sons to the sea one by one, and the play follows the final loss. Running barely twenty minutes, it achieves a tragic weight that puts longer works to shame, finding in the cadences of Aran Irish-English a poetry that Synge himself described as arising from 'the imagination of the people.' Yeats considered it the most perfect dramatic poem in English. Its formal compression — a single room, a single morning, a single irreversible event — makes it ideal as an introduction to serious dramatic literature.