It began as it was to continue, with conflicts and controversies. Synge's first performed play, The Shadow of the Glen, precipitated a split in the Irish National Theatre Society that staged it. At the play's premiere on 8 October 1903 in the Molesworth Hall in Dublin, two of the company walked out in protest, along with the recently resigned Vice-President of the INTS, Maud Gonne. Arthur Griffith led a strong editorial campaign against it in his paper United Irishman. Even though Synge had based the one-act comedy on a folk-story told him in the Aran Islands of a man pretending to be dead to expose his wife's infidelity, the play was judged to be unIrish, and Synge was accused of decadent foreign influences. His play was 'a corrupt version' of the 'Widow of Ephesus' and 'no more Irish than the Decameron'. Irishwomen, Griffith claimed, 'are the most virtuous in the world'; however loveless an Irish rural marriage might be, the housewife, unlike Nora Burke in Synge's play, does not go off with a Tramp. In spite of the enthusiastic promotion of Yeats, in part because of it, Synge's plays were suspect from the start. And they were never to become popular in Ireland in his lifetime. Even Riders to the Sea, his one play later to attract respectful admiration from Dublin audiences, was regarded with dismay when first produced on 25 February 1904. 'The long exposure of the dead body before an audience may be realistic, but it certainly is not artistic,' complained the Irish Times. 'There are some things that are lifelike, and yet are quite unfit for presentation on the stage, and we think that “Riders to the Sea” is one of them.'