Riders to the Sea main character Maurya, an old peasant woman, standing on the coast

Riders to the Sea

by J. M. Synge

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Discuss Synge's Riders to the Sea as a one-act play.

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Synge's Riders to the Sea as a one-act play emphasizes the relentless nature of the sea and the inevitability of fate. The structure concentrates the action and theme into an uncomplicated story, highlighting the repetitive loss of family members to the sea. This format allows the play to deliver a brief but intense vision of universal truths, focusing on the inexorable forces of nature and fate.

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The one-act structure of Riders to the Sea emphasizes the relentless nature of the sea and the inevitability of fate. At the beginning of the play, Maurya, the matriarch of the family, finds out that one of her two remaining sons, Michael, has drowned. She has already lost all her other sons, save Bartley—the last remaining son, to the sea, and her husband has also drowned.

She knows that when her last living son, Bartley, leaves on a boat, that he will drown. She says, "He's gone now, God spare us, and we'll not see him again. He's gone now, and when the black night is falling I'll have no son left me in the world." Her words emphasize the inevitability of fate, as she rightly predicts that by nightfall, she will have lost all her sons. She believes at first that the priest will be able to stop Bartley...

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from going to sea, but the priest cannot do so, signifying the inutility of religion and the force of fate. The fast rising action of this one-act play highlights the way that fate moves forward and the way in which no mortal can stop it.

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The one-act play structure concentrates the action and thus the theme, into an uncomplicated story, almost an anecdote rather than a narrative. By limiting the character developments of the other people in the story, notably the sisters, the author can concentrate on the “character” of the Aran Isles themselves, and dramatize the repetitions in the plot elements (losses at sea of family members). What is dramatized in a one-act play is a brief but condensed vision into a universal truth, while a longer play, say the works of Ibsen, relates a specific example of several general truths. The three-act play structure, let us say as delineated by Eugene Scribe, breaks a play’s development into rising action, first complication, denouement, etc., while a one act play’s structure is a thrust in one direction, reaching its climactic image with little “structure” other than the inevitability of the forces set in motion by, here, the natural laws of the sea.

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