Importance of Chorus in Riders to the Sea

Q. Discuss about the importance of the chorus in Synge’s play Riders to the Sea.

The chorus in Classical Greek drama was a group of actors who described and commented upon the main action of a play with song, dance, and recitation. Greek tragedy had its beginnings in choral performances, in which a group of fifty men danced and sang dithyrambs – lyric hymns in praise of the god Dionysus. The chorus commented on the action and characters of the play as a detached omniscient group. Throughout Greek plays Such as Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Lysistrata, the chorus function as a storytelling device by serving as a link between the audience and the piece itself. In recent plays it is usually replaced with side characters having choric functions, like Cathleen and Nora in Synge‘s Riders to the Sea.

The two daughters of old Maurya in Synge’s tragedy in one act, Riders to the Sea, may be seen as somewhat choric. They observe and comment, wait and see, from their allotted space, as things happen to their household, underscoring the fatal inscrutability of the despotic sea. Both Cathleen and Nora are young peasant girls confined to their domestic chores. Cathleen, the elder sister, is a bit more experienced than Nora who serves as a link with the world outside. Nora brings news and views, talks to the priest and Bartley’s friends, and reports on the sea and the availability of the boat going to the Galway fair:

Cathleen:  What is it you have?

Nora:  The young priest is after bringing them. It’s a shirt and a plain stocking were got off a drowned man in Donegal.

Both Cathleen and Nora are helpless observers and only marginal participants who do not know how to appease the all­ devouring sea, how to stave the catastrophe off. Nora can bring the bundle of clothes from the priest and Cathleen can bake a cake for her brother. The two sisters can together identify the clothes in the bundle to be those of their dead brother, Michael. When in the end everybody mourns the death of Bartley, Cathleen asks the old man to make the coffin and have the cake she had baked for Bartley.

Nora and Cathleen, the two sisters, primarily also provide relief amid the taut atmosphere of gloom and suspense. The two sisters give the audience temporary moments of relief. Like that of a formal chorus here from the beginning of play they­ emphasizes the values and culture of the Aran people. In sentiment, they become a symbol of Aran county girls and in times we can search through their words for the likes of the sea, lives of the young fisherman, what the young priest say and nearby geographical location etc, These entire things must have their interlinked association to death but for the brief moments theirs are a pause to the tragic overthrown. Again introduction to such innocent girls in the tragic plot creates a false believe that these girl can never loss their brother.

Though unlike a full scale five act play Synge could not enjoy the liberty of giving the chorus, ample, time and space in order to comment upon and interpret the action. Cathleen, at least on one occasion makes a comment which remains the most glaring truth about the central problem of the play. Cathleen tells Maurya while she desperately tries to prevent Bartley from undertaking a ride to the sea that ‘It’s the life of a young man to be going on the sea’, – this statement throws the most significant light upon the inevitability of being a rider to the sea in the lives of the Aran Islanders.

As Chorus, however, Cathleen and Nora are partly imperfect, since on one occasion the two sisters fail to interpret the action in the proper light. For example, when  Maurya accepts her final destiny calmly, while she had howled and wailed exasperatedly on earlier occasions when her other sons had died, and particularly when Michael was lost, Nora feels that it is because Maurya loves Michael more than Bartley that she calmly accepts the death of Bartley. Nora Says, “She’s quiet now and easy; but the day Michael was drowned you could hear her crying out from this to the spring well. It’s fonder she was of Michael, and would anyone have thought that?”

In conclusion, it can be said that in Synge’s play, Riders to the Sea Cathleen and Nora are integrated in the chief action of the drama and they are brilliantly attached to one another as unison. They form coherent units through which the plots are gradually developed from exposition to devastating climax. Their speech serves to reinforce leading theme of death and also make it known to the spectators the events that precede the opening of the play and often outline coming events. Truly the magical presence of Cathleen and Nora is interpretive and complex.