RTÉ Television are set to remember the 100th anniversary of the Playboy Riots with ‘Playboy 100’, a night of special programming on RTÉ Two on Saturday 27th January, starting at 9.00pm.
Hosted by John Kelly, ‘Playboy 100’ will feature the television premiere of the recent Druid production of The Playboy of the Western World, described as “breathtaking” in the New York Times when it played there as part of the DruidSynge tour. A specially commissioned documentary looks at the controversy surrounding the play’s first night on 26th January 1907 and how the feelings which surfaced on Abbey Street a hundred years ago shaped the future of both the Abbey and Irish drama itself.
‘Playboy 100’ begins at 9.00pm with ‘Playboys and Rebels’, a half-hour documentary directed by Robert Quinn for Wildfire Films, telling the story of that dramatic night 100 years ago. It also looks at how such tensions are still in evidence in contemporary Ireland, for example in the controversy last year surrounding Stuart Carolan’s Empress of India and the experience of Northern Irish playwright Gary Mitchell (above, centre) - forced into hiding since his work sparked attack and outrage from his own loyalist community. Other contributors include Colm Tóibín (above, left), Garry Hynes (above, right), Christopher Morash, Diarmuid Ferriter, John O’Donoghue, Anne Enright, Eamon Morrissey and Fiach MacConghail.
‘Playboys and Rebels’ is followed by the television premiere of Garry Hynes’ acclaimed production for Druid Theatre Company of ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, starring Catherine Walsh, Aaron Monaghan, Marie Mullen and Eamonn Morrissey.
The night concludes with an opportunity to see ‘Mighty Talk: A Journey with DruidSynge’, the Arts Lives documentary which followed Garry Hynes’ production of Synge’s plays from Galway rehearsal room to applause in Dublin, Edinburgh, New York and, in a moving return to the writer’s inspiration, the Aran Islands.
For full details, log on to www.rte.ie/tv/playboy100
