Simon Boyle insists upon due and proper credit for his daddy-killin' in DRUID's Playboy of the Western World. Photo by Nick Burchell.

It’s already a cliché – or perhaps a symptom of our diseased, decaying age - that getting shot is nowadays regarded as a smart career move (see Curtis James Jackson III, DBA Fifty Cent). Time was, if a young buck wanted to make a name for himself, he had to kill somebody.

That’s the premise of The Playboy of the Western World anyway, Irishman John Millington Synge’s delightful 101-year-old play, which secured his reputation before he took his mortal bow at the tender age of 37. DRUID, the Galway-based theatre company, is performing the feature-length Playboy along with a quick Synge one-act, The Shadow of the Glen, at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theatre through Saturday night only. Closing-night tickets are gone, leaving you with two opportunities to catch the double-bill – and catch it ye should, surely!

Shadow, a brisk comic requiem for a marriage, is the undercard. The first of Synge’s plays to reach the stage, it was hailed upon its opening in 1903 as “a slur on Irish womanhood.” Actually, that wasn’t meant as praise, probably, but it just goes to show how ahead-of-its-time this thing was. To talk about the thematic stuff sketched out here that gets fuller, er, play in Playboy would be to traffic in churlish spoilerage, if indeed spoilerage can be said to apply to a play that opened a couple months before the Wright Brothers’ historic flight at Kitty Hawk.

In Playboy, the excitable Christy Mahon (Simon Boyle) shows up at a public house one dark, daaaaaaaaahhhhhrk night claiming to have caved his Da’s head in with a shovel. The setting is rural County Mayo, the sort of place where they run mule races on the beach at low tide for fun. Naturally, the barmaid, Pegeen Mike (Sarah-Jane Drummey) – and a trio of girls – greet the motormouthed fugitive with Jonas Brother-level approbation. (“He tells it lovely,” one of girls exclaims, after Christy repeats his torrid tale of patricide.)

Christy is desperate to prolong his 15 minutes, at least until he can convince Pegeen Mike to marry him, but for all his daddy-slayin’ enthusiasm, he just can’t keep things together. “There's a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed,” Peggy observes as Christy’s celebrity glow begins its inevitable wane. The performances are lusty and broad, as they must be to work in the looking-down-into-a-diorama configuration of the Terrace Theatre.

DRUID was hailed in 2005 for its staging of all six of Synge’s plays in a single, eight-hour production, which has gone on to tour internationally. No surprise, then, that this riotous two-fer, directed by Synge founder Garry Hynes, features a sparkling company in full command of Synge’s sensuous, rustic poetry. If a town of easily-frightened boys, “young, limber girls and fine, prancing women making laughter with the men,” sounds like your idea of a fine night out, run, don’t walk. Surely.

The Shadow of the Glen and The Playboy of the Western World are at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theatre tonight, Friday and Saturday nights only. All performances are at 7:30 p.m. The 30-minute Shadow is first, followed by a 15-minute intermission, then the 110-minute Playboy in its entirety. Tickets are available here.