No wonder that members of the cast felt conflicted. The Abbey had, after all, recruited many stalwarts from the ranks of advanced nationalism, who had joined in the belief that it was one of the few liberated zones in an occupied country. Some of the actors were in silent agreement with them. They insisted that the Irish were not by nature a violent people – and on the second night they stormed the stage and rushed the actors to prove their point. Protesters against his new play uttered "vociferations in Gaelic", according to newspaper reports. His labours to appease Irish Ireland were in vain. So he created sentences in which standard English was reconfigured by peasants who were thinking still in Irish: "Is it you that's going to town tomorrow?" "Is it tomorrow that you're going to town?" Emphasis is achieved not by tonal underlining but by bringing the key word forward to the start of the sentence. Synge believed that there could, albeit in an English as Irish as it is possible for that language to be. Nationalists also resented the implication behind the Abbey project that there could ever be an Irish national literature in English, the language of the coloniser.
They didn't like the frenchified themes of his earlier plays such as The Shadow of the Glen, in which a frustrated young wife in the Wicklow mountains walks away from her home and marriage into the arms of a tramp whose name she doesn't even know. Synge's relation with nationalists had always been uneasy. Even before the opening night of Saturday 26 January 1907, trouble was brewing.
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