The Synge Summer School at Rathdrum in Co Wicklow is now established as one of the most interesting, informative and relaxed venues for the discussion of modern Irish theatre. Under the direction of Nicholas Grene, opened first by Cyril Cusack in 1991 and by Seamus Heaney in 2000, the school has been a meeting place for practitioners, critics and academics. Harlequin Players have offered annual performances, beginning with The Shadow of the Glen and The Tinkers' Wedding and continuing this year with The Playboy of the Western World. Synge has always held centre stage. However, wider issues are included on the agenda. Panel discussions have taken stock of the present, with consideration of Irish theatre today, of contemporary Irish cinema, of directors and directions in contemporary drama. Participants in these discussions have included Lynne Parker, Stephen Rea, Olwen Fouere, Tom Murphy, Fiona Shaw, Jocelyn Clarke and Anne Enright. Lecturers have included Derek Mahon, Ann Saddlemeyer, George Watson, Philip Edwards, Lucy McDiarmid, Anna McMullan and Adrian Frazier. With such a cast to choose from it is not surprising that Interpreting Synge, a collection of writings by several hands all drawn from the schools first decade, should make for the best possible reading.
The editor has chosen writings devoted to Synge alone. Such a deliberately narrow focus allows the writers to be, without quite knowing it, in conversation and in disagreement with each other. The sequencing of the collection does not follow the chronology of delivery at the Synge School, but is rather thematic and appositional. Such editorial arrangements make the connections between the essays more acute and the reader is well advised to read sequentially this collection that places side by side not only essays by Roy Foster, Angela Bourke, Christopher Morash and others, but also poems on Synge by Heaney, Kennelly, Ni Dhomhnaill and Dawe.
The collection is timely, coming as it does in the wake of W.J. McCormack's new biography of Synge and following late upon Maurice Harmon's collection of centenary essays in 1971. Grene's introduction justifies publication of these essays now: Synge's drama is associated with a late romantic cult of the peasant, a pastoral kitsch particularly distasteful in a country bent on establishing its credentials as a fully modernised urban society. The mist that does be on the bog can stay there. And so, though lip-service is paid to Synge's genius and the canonical status of his work is accepted, there has been no new critical monograph on Synge in 15 years, and books on Synge published in Ireland have been particularly rare. Synge emerges here as a recalcitrant member of his class, confident, courteous, e
xact, formal, direct, and in any balancing of life and art wholly given to the realities of life. These qualities link several of the essays: Angela Bourke values Synge's exactness of observation and judges the text and stage-directions of his plays to be a valuable resource for students of the tradition of caoineadh in Irish social history and literature; Roy Foster notices Synge's confidence and the contrast it offered to Yeats who, reading John Morley's description of Synge as a gentleman, "knew it described qualities he did not have"; Anthony Roche, in an extraordinarily subtle account of why Synge deferred marriage with Molly Allgood, elicits the code of values in which Synge spoke of his "rage when I think of the people who go on as if art and literature and writing were the first thing in the world"; Declan Kiberd discovers a Swiftian directness and fragmentation in The Aran Islands whereby Synge discovers that "his own society is the only one he can reform without destroying".
We learn much about the formal artificiality of Synge's dramatic language from Martin Hilsky's account of his own and others attempts to translate Synge for the Czech theatre. We encounter fascinating implicit disagreements about the politics of Riders to the Sea, between on the one hand Bourke and Kiberd, both of whom value its classical status as an act of mourning, and on the other hand Tom Paulin who interprets the play as a revisionist tragedy in which Maurya's unforgiving commitment to memory and to the dead is in a negative contrast with Bartley's active pragmatism. Antoinette Quinn reflects on the complex reasons that caused Maud Gonne and Maire Quinn to stage a walk-out from the first production of In the Shadow of the Glen, protesting, again, at the pragmatic immorality of Synge's Nora who leaves her husband for a tramp.
The Dublin audiences of Synge's plays were in a state of transition. In 1906 the Abbey introduced some cheap seating for "the common sixpenny public". On 26 January 1907 the auditorium was full for the first night of the Playboy and the audience included many well used to the boisterous activity enjoyed by theatre goers at the Queen's. Christopher Morash offers an extraordinarily vivid account of the Playboy riots and of the mild judgement of the offenders in the courts and in the media. His conclusion is remarkable: the riots were in large part an attempt by theatregoers on one side of a doubly-divided middle class to resist the erosion of a common right to heckle both players and play, a right licensed by their very presence in a theatre. The new decorum of the Abbey, with its insistence that the plays be listened to in silence, was hard won.
"It was a day of triumph," reported Yeats, "when the first act of The Well of the Saints held its audience, though the two chief persons sat side by side under a stone cross from start to finish." Frank McGuinness's essay finds in Ibsen an important and surprising precursor of Synge, with Pegeen Mike and Peer Gynt in conversation, the one failed adventurer deriving her exuberance from the other. Throughout all these essays there is evidence of Synge's demand for joy, in its widest sense, an impossible demand that haunted the later Ibsen. That demand for joy has been reduced in much present-day Irish theatre to a bleak parody of the formal artificiality of Synge's language that leaves the audience no response other than a shame-filled laughter.
Kevin Barry is professor of English at NUI, Galway