Riders to the Sea
A one-act play set on the Aran Islands, where a mother has already lost her husband and four sons to the sea, and her last two are preparing to go out. Synge takes the shape of a Greek tragedy and fills it with the speech he had heard on the islands.
The language is deliberately plain and repetitive, and the repetitions do the work of the chorus. There is no villain and no rescue, only a sequence of small domestic tasks that continue while the disaster approaches. It takes half an hour to read and is one of the most concentrated things in Irish theatre.
Public-domain status
First published in 1904. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; John Millington Synge died in 1909, so this work has been free to republish there since 1980.
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