Lady of the Light

Ghost Light

As she roams the streets of this post-war city, the impoverished Allgood also wanders the delusionary corridors of memory. Her once dazzling career has faded, but she returns compulsively to where it all began: a teenage affair with a man 20 years her senior, the greatest Irish playwright of the 20th century, John Millington Synge.

Judged alongside the self-mythologising Yeats and the dutiful diarist Lady Gregory, Synge is the most obscure of those responsible for the Irish dramatic renaissance. A difficult, irritable and unforgiving man, his was a reticent genius scarred by a childhood of immense loneliness. The son of a once-prosperous landowning family, Synge is contemptuous of anything less than aesthetic perfection. Allgood, the rebellious, irreverent tenement girl should not be his love, but she is.