 He is best known for his play "The Playboy of the Western World", which caused riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre.Although he came from a privileged Anglo-Irish background, Synge's writings are mainly concerned with the world of the Catholic peasants of rural Ireland and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view.Synge developed Hodgkin's disease, a metastatic cancer that was then untreatable.