Synge’s writing style in Riders to the Sea is simple, poetic, and dialect-heavy. It is simple in two different senses. First, while some playwrights include highly detailed staging requirements and stage directions, Synge keeps his instructions quite minimal. For example, when describing the set-up on stage, all he writes is “Cottage kitchen, with nets, oil-skins, spinning wheel, some new boards standing by the wall, etc.” By including the “etc.,” Synge implies that he trusts the director of the play to build off of his vision. The stage directions throughout the play are also, for the most part, simple and direct, such as “She goes over to the table with the bundle” and “She looks round at the board.” Again, Synge trusts the director and actors to decide what sorts of emotions or movements to express with these vague actions.
There is also a poetic, repetitive quality to the way that Synge writes the dialogue of his characters. For example, characters mention the white boards (as noted in the staging instructions) six different times in a 10-page play. And they do so in similar ways: “the finest white boards,” “fine white boards,” “make me a good coffin out of the white boards,” “will have a fine coffin out of the white boards,” and more. These kinds of repetitive phrases and lines grant the play a poetic quality, almost like Synge is returning to a refrain. This adds to the mournful, elegiac quality of the prose.
Finally, Synge’s style intentionally seeks to replicate the way that people from the Aran Islands actually speak. He captures the dialect by having characters use specific words in Gaelic and also using a particular form of Irish English grammar.
