Riders to the Sea

Riders to the Sea A Play in One Act By J. M. Synge Riders to the Sea is a play written by Irish Literary Renaissance playwright John Millington Synge. It was first performed on 25 February 1904 at the Molesworth Hall, Dublin, by the Irish National Theater Society. A one-act tragedy, the play is set in the Aran Islands, Inishmaan, and like all of Synge's plays it is noted for capturing the poetic dialogue of rural Ireland. 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. In 1897, J. M. Synge was encouraged by his friend and colleague William Butler Yeats to visit the Aran islands. He went on to spend the summers from 1898 to 1903 there. While on the Aran island of Inishmaan, Synge heard the story of a man from Inishmaan whose body washed up on the shore of the island of Donegal, which inspired Riders to the Sea. Riders to the Sea is written in the dialect of the Aran islands: Hyberno-English.