Synge’s writing for the stage explores the potential of theatre as a place where the sounds and the shapes of words are buzzing in a terrain that is uncertain. It’s a noisy place, and a very busy place – a place that is brought into being through the energies of words rushing to be formed, in a hurry to be voiced and heard. If anything, there is proliferation and excess of language words are spilling over the edges of the frame. All of his effort was dedicated to the invention of a new language for the stage, one born of the specificities of theatre. For Synge, theatre was a place that afforded opportunities for the unleashing of the written word into a space that would become animated though the voicing of the word, carried on the breath of the actor. It is not a place of realism, but a place of effort, of struggle to listen and to hear. What did Beckett take from Synge, when he came to make his own plays for the stage? Can we say that he was influenced by the playwright whose plays he saw at the Abbey when he was a student in Dublin?