Riders to the sea- as one act play

John  Mellington Synge’s Riders to the sea is one of the greatest tragedies in one act the world has ever produced.The origin of the one act play can be traced to the Satyr plays of the Greek of the 4^th century B.C. which were intended to provide relief at the end of the performance of serious tragedies.The modern one act plays are the replica of the Greek Satyr plays particularly in respect that both can be enjoyed without too much expense of effort and time.

A one act play, as the name itself signifies, is a play confined within a single act, but it is in no way a three act or five act play, nor it can be elaborated into a five act drama- it is as distinct from the full length play as the short story is from the novel;  and whether a single act comprises one scene only or is cut up into several scenes that is simply a technical matter. As a result ,a one act play cannot afford to deal with a slice of life and gets hold of a particular situation or incident charged with immense dramatic possibilities. Evidently, the concentration not elaboration is the central spirit of a one act play. Indeed Synge’s soul-stirring single scene tragedy, Riders to the sea in spite of its brief compass attains a tragic sublimity that invites comparison with Shakespeare’s. The plot of Riders to the sea is compact to the extreme and closely knit and it produces the required unity of impression- though brief, it is complete in itself. It has , within its small compass, the beginning, the middle and the end: the exposition consisting of the conversation between Cathleen and Nora, complication and climax followed by catastrophe and denuament where mother’s elegiac blessings of the living and the dead and her stoical resignation to the will of God adds a special flavor of completeness, giving the play an extraordinary stature of universal significance.

It is undeniable that with this unity of action, the unities of time and place are also strictly maintained – the action of the play begins only about an hour or so before the dead body of Bartley is brought to the house and the span of time in which the action occurs is just about five or six hours of a day.But what is more notable that the action of the play never moves away from the tiny cottage kitchen .

Another important feature of one act play is the fewness of character.Unlike the plethora of characters of the full length drama, the numbers of characters in Riders to the Sea can be instantly named- Maurya, Cathleen, Nora, Bartley, the young priest, an absentee character and a few keening women. 

The unity of atmosphere also contributes to the effectiveness of Riders to the Sea as one act play.  The dismal setting with ropes and white boards for the coffin , the constantly weeping afflicted mother, the hushed voice of the two daughter and the presence of number-symbols give uniformly a dark hue to the atmosphere.

Thus, as a piece of tragedy Riders to the Sea , the suigeneris of twentieth century literature is perhaps he greatest of the modern one act plays.R.J. Rees rightly calls the play “ a masterpiece of our dramatic literature”.