DER HELD DER WESTLICHEN WELT. Komische Oper in 3
Akten nach Synge: The Playboy of the Western World

They drink hard in a pub on the west coast of the Irish county Mayo. In the middle of the loud chaos appears a thin young fellow who proudly maintains to have murdered his father. The hostess falls in love with the boy and makes him the barman of the pub. Alone now, the hostess and hero celebrate their love when there are heavy knocks on the door: it is none other than the boy’s boorish father, who has come to take his runaway son home.
The guests ask about the new barman and find out the shameful truth from the hostess Love: the boy has not killed his father at all. Then the alleged hero appears anew and swears: this time he has done it. The sceptical listeners are only ready to believe this after a complicated decathlon that the hero wins sovereignty. He proposes marriage to the hostess, which she accepts, enraptured. But then the very-much-alive father shows up once again to fetch his son, who is supposed to marry the widow Casey, his former nurse. During the ensuing fight the father rips the son out of the arms of the hostess and saves him from the fury of the angry guests.
The hero returns to the pub a third time, but his rather shy opinion that he has this time really polished off the old man meets with blind rage: the pub visitors, bored to death, immediately nail him to the wall. And again, the father appears as the rescuer in time of need. Exhausted and frustrated, he begs his son to finally act according to his threat, but the boy cannot even lift the heavy hatchet. Having returned home, the overjoyed mother awaits them with the news that the father has finally found work as a lumberjack – all the break-out attempts are now forgotten, the almighty family idyll brings them all back to their former places.

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