Two telegrams tell the story of the opening night of JM Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. Both were sent to WB Yeats by flamboyant Lady Gregory, who was helping him run the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland's embryonic national theatre. He was woken up in Aberdeen by the first, sent at the close of act one: "Play a great success." Two acts later, she sent a second: "Play broke up in disorder at the word 'shift'."

According to William Fay, playing the lead, the audience had become "a veritable mob of howling devils" at this mention of a petticoat. Soon, "the uproar had become a riot". The mob was only prevented from storming the stage by the call-boy, who "had armed himself with a big axe... and swore by all the saints in the calendar that he would chop the head off the first lad who came over the footlights".

The Irish Independent dubbed the riots "a tribute to the good taste and common sense of the audience". Objections to the play were manifold. The tale of an Irish village idolising a man who has killed his own father was, wrote Arthur Griffiths, editor of the United Irishman, "a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language". To the Evening Mail, it was "absurd and un-Irish", while the Freeman's Journal found it "an unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant men and, worse still, upon Irish peasant girlhood". It published a letter from "A Western Girl" who objected to the use of "a word indicating an essential item of female attire, which the lady would probably never utter in ordinary circumstances, even to herself". How, one wonders, would she ask for a shift in a shop?

By Monday, the play opened to an audience ready to riot. "As it was impossible for any of us to be heard," Fay said later, "I arranged with the cast that we should simply walk through the play." A critic from the Dublin Evening Mail arrived, hoping "to see that vexatious play... But the gods had willed it otherwise. Technically considered, perhaps they were not gods; they were confined mostly to the left-hand side of the upper end of the house; but they were all-powerful." Fay begged the protestors to leave and get their money back. They refused. He called the police, which made things worse: "Not content with libelling the saintly Irish people, we had actually called in the tyrant Saxon's myrmidons to silence their righteous indignation."

People hissed, booed, played bugles and had coughing fits. Yeats harangued the audience to stop. Synge, wrote a friend, "sat motionless through the dumb-show of his play" while rioters cried: "Kill the author!" By Thursday, the Abbey had padded the floors with felt, which, said Fay, "frustrated the rhythmic stamping". Some protestors were arrested. In court, Justice Wall proclaimed the rights of an audience to "cry down a play" - but fined them anyway.

On January 31, an Irish Independent editorial noted that while "the staging of the piece was an act of inexplicable stupidity" on the part of "that rather tiresome chatterer and poseur, Mr William Butler Yeats", the rioting was "unpardonable". It also suggested the problem was not so much the play but its staging at the Abbey: "It was not for the purpose of lessening Ireland's self-respect and holding her people up to the ridicule of the world that the 'National Theatre' was established."

Maybe the problem was simply semantic. The Oxford English Dictionary says: "In the 17th century, 'smock' began to be displaced by 'shift' as a more 'delicate' expression: in the 19th century the latter has, from the same motive, given place to 'chemise'." Perhaps if Synge had used the historically incorrect "chemise", the riots would never have occurred.