Chapter 3 argues that the cultural and performance practices of the Irish peasantry written into Synge’s plays celebrate the living on of rural Ireland’s residual culture. It focusses on 'keening' ‒ or 'caoineadh' in Irish ‒ in Deirdre of the Sorrows, The Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea. The frame that Synge chose for his adaptation of the ritual of the Irish lament, that is, the stage of an institutional theatre, contributed to some degree in hollowing the practice out of its agency and ran the risk of transforming the ritual into a mere spectacle. However, as keening was part of a performance tradition, it also possessed abilities to resist this form of disempowerment. The stage directions relating to the performance of the lament ritual in the three plays are very much open to interpretation and leave the director free to fashion the performance of the keen as he or she pleases. Depending on the directorial choices then, the performance of the stage keen will either seal the irrevocable loss of a cultural formation or highlight its residual living on and encourage a perception of loss as a creative process, containing germs for a reconfiguration of the collective.