IRISH STUDIES: "Tinkers": Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller By Mary Burke Oxford University Press, 329pp. £50 THIS YEAR marks the centenary of JM Synge's untimely death at the age of 38 from Hodgkin's Disease, so this book is timely.
When Synge has surfaced in recent scholarly volumes, it has increasingly been in the context of studies whose primary focus is on the anthropological or the ethnographic. The key terms considered in both areas – the “primitive” and the “tinker” – both require quotation marks and a lengthy sub-title to give the more acceptable contemporary term.
José Lanters's The "Tinkers" in Irish Literatureappeared last year and is now joined by Mary Burke's from Oxford. "Tinkers" is a not a history of the Irish Traveller per se; how could it be, when that culture is predominantly oral and self-protective? Rather, it looks at the representations of peripatetic peoples – and the diversity of names under which they have been identified – across hundreds of years, with particular emphasis on the last century. But that analysis is informed by a sensitivity to Traveller culture and illuminating contextualisation from the increased prominence of Traveller activism since the late 1960s, not least in relation to texts which have emanated from within that community.
Though Synge is not Mary Burke's sole concern, The Tinker's Weddingis at the centre of her study. She argues that the play's critical neglect has partly arisen from "the dearth of research concerning the deep and long textual history of the tinker figure from which Synge's portrayal emerges". The term itself and its proto-ethnic connotations were imported from 19th-century England and projected on to the Irish siúlóir, shuileir and lucht siúil (walkers or walking people). Burke discerns a reluctance on the part of Irish nationalism to confront the interchange between Ireland and England which has always informed Traveller discourse; instead, she delineates a compensating investment in theories of Oriental origin, whether Phoenician/Carthaginian or Indian, rendering the traveller exotic.
This background material most reveals the book's origins in a doctoral thesis, but is necessary to show the cultural hybridity and long history of discourse informing the trope, nuances of which the deeply studied Synge was aware and to which he was sensitive. Burke's shows how The Tinker's Weddingworks to break down the binary opposite between settled and nomad, as played out in the exchange between the priest and (primarily) the two "tinker" women. But she could have been more attentive to the gender play involved, particularly since the male's role makes him so obviously a patriarch of the established order. She does, however, describe Synge's Mary Byrne as "a prototype of the Traveller woman artist" when she comes to discuss two contemporary works emanating from within the community, Juanita Casey's The Horse of Seleneand Rosaleen McDonagh's play The Baby Doll Project. And there is an inspired connection between McDonagh's deliberate cultivation of "all that is considered vulgar by elite, urban Celtic Tiger taste" in her play and the provocative updating of the tinkers' dress in the 2005 Druid Synge production.
What Burke's analysis suggests is that The Tinker's Weddingis only coming into its own in terms of analysis and production now that Traveller culture has emerged from invisibility.
In addition to considering Synge's other marginalised figures, Burke's study goes on to provide much-needed critical interpretation of a mid-century play like Frank Carney's The Righteous Are Bold, where the returned emigrant is believed to be possessed by the aggressive spirit of a Spanish Gypsy; again, the conflict is between a verbally and physically unruly woman and a male patriarch defending the status quo. There is welcome attention to the "inclusive" vision of Bryan McMahon in his 1960s work The Honey Spike, and to the improvisatory collaboration between John Arden, Margaretta D'Arcy and the Galway Theatre Workshop on No Room at the Inn(1976).
The most extended and valuable discussion is of the drama of Tom Murphy. The Carney family of A Whistle in the Darkreact to their own demonisation as "Paddies" in English culture by using "tinkers" as a term of abuse; and Burke reads The House as a riposte to Yeats's Purgatory, with the "tinkers'" seizure of the Big House now viewed sympathetically. The unparalleled linguistic hybrid which is the language of a Murphy play finds room for fugitive words such as "sham" which Burke identifies as a "Cant word meaning 'man' or 'settled man'".
She might also have considered Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats, where Hester Swayne's status as a traveller is continuously castigated by the "respectable" community. When Holly Hunter played Carr's Hester, she did not try for an Irish accent, but found an equivalent in a Deep Southern "white trash" voice. This would have linked well with Burke's last chapter, 'Screening the Traveller', where the emphasis is on movie narratives from the US. There, the image is more positive than Irish screen equivalents, since the "unruly" behaviour of the Traveller can be recuperated via the romanticised "outlaw" origins of the US and American culture's narrative yearning for redemptive endings.
The book ends, as it should, with Perry Ogden's Pavee Lackeen(2005) and its centring on a day in the life of a 10-year-old traveller Winnie Maughan. With a cast of Traveller actors in the lead roles, it marks a significant step towards the creation of works from within the community. Mary Burke's impressively researched, stimulating and wide-ranging book raises questions about how Travellers have been represented and about our acceptance of diversity which are far from being answered in the Ireland of the 21st century.
Anthony Roche is associate professor in the school of English, drama and film, University College Dublin. An updated second edition of his Contemporary Irish Dramahas just been published by Palgrave Macmillan