Experiencing a Synge play for the first time is not just watching any story unfold. Something is happening on the stage that you have never quite felt before. People are speaking in a language which appears to be English, but it is an English once or twice removed. What precisely it is removed from is not that clear either. But the sets and the setting tell you that this is Ireland, and these are people who would be speaking Irish if the audience could only understand them. But most of the people of Ireland could not understand a play in Irish in the early years of the twentieth century and, more assuredly, the greater part of the world could not either. It is obvious, therefore, that Synge is doing something with his Irish peasantry, and is attempting to mimic some kind of Irish. When characters in a Synge play speak, the air hums with something that does not quite belong. Their relationship with reality is oblique and romantic. Their tongue is a twisted idiom, at times crude, at times poetic. The serious academic question is, what part of his language belongs to him, and what part of it belongs to the Irish language? There is no doubt whatsoever that Synge had a fine command of Irish. Declan Kiberd's book Synge and the Irish Language is the most authoritative study of Synge's relationship with the language, and most anything else is likely to be no more than a footnote to that study.