Irish Culture: In The Theatre of Nation, Ben Levitas sees the Irish theatre and politics as distinct but overlapping spheres of cultural activity. Because the theatre movement always used the term "national" in its various configurations, it ensured that its productions would not be assessed on purely aesthetic or dramatic criteria but as contributions to a wider cultural and political debate, writes Anthony Roche.
While not selling short the achievements of Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory, Levitas's subtly argued and impressively researched study recontextualises their plays alongside less canonical works of which we have lost sight and tracks the volatile debate about what should properly constitute an Irish theatre through the various journals and newspapers of the period.
The book begins by considering the theatrical fare on offer in the capital in the 1890s. Political melodrama, primarily centred on 1798, held sway at the Queen's Theatre. Boucicault and its other practitioners increasingly fell out of favour with advanced nationalists, in large part because the increasing complexity of political developments could no longer be processed satisfactorily through the staples of melodrama, especially the prerequisite of a happy ending. Instead, Ibsen's radical theatre was advanced as a model for progressive thought. Out of this, Levitas discerns a connection, which his study explores, between dramatic innovation and a more progressive political nationalism, both looking towards the judgment of the future. In this context, a play such as Yeats's Land of Heart's Desire contained more by way of political relevance than the melodramatic staples. Levitas gives welcome attention to the three-year experiment of the Irish Literary Theatre (1899-1901). The ILT experiment drew together the dramatis personae and set the terms for much that was to follow at the Abbey, including a riot at the opening night of Yeats's The Countess Cathleen. The third year's high point was a play in the Irish language, Douglas Hyde's Casadh an tSúgáin. But plays in Irish did not readily or rapidly follow, and it was increasingly conceded that a national drama might also be expressed in an English which yet retained an Irish idiom and style.
In all of this, one senses Synge waiting in the wings. Despite what Levitas says in the closing pages about not wishing to cast the dramatist as the primary provocateur, this is precisely what he does. Whenever Yeats and Gregory manage to assuage outraged nationalist reaction to the most recent Synge production, along he comes with another. The net effect of this is for Levitas to establish in his chapter on The Playboy of the Western World the extent to which Synge was deliberately constructing the play to work upon the raw sensibilities of his audience. He also shows how many of those who first condemned play and author later reversed their opinion, none more importantly for this study's purpose than Patrick Pearse. The Abbey opened its doors to the pupils of St Enda's on more than one occasion, thus illustrating how the alienation from the nationalist camp was never too prolonged. But several years after Synge's death, the Pearse who had condemned the Playboy described him as "a man in whose sad heart there glowed a true love of Ireland, one of two or three men who have made Ireland considerable in the eyes of the world". This act of identification underwrites the book's concluding representation of Easter 1916 as an act of political theatre, "part mystery play, part melodrama, part avant-garde provocation", where what stalks through the Post Office with Pearse is not Cuchulainn, as Yeats thought, but the ghost of Christy Mahon.
This book has much to say about a good deal else of interest, including related developments in the Ulster Literary Theatre and the rise of both working-class and feminist theatres. But even one of the plays presented by the ULT, The Mist That Does Be On The Bog: A fog in one act, clearly parodies Synge and shows his influence as inescapable. The titles of the book's chapters also reflect this: 'The Loy in Irish Politics', 'The Mahon and the Echo'. A hundred years on, we are still coming to grips with Synge's dramatic and political legacy, a process to which Levitas's study makes a central contribution.
Anthony Roche is Senior Lecturer in English at UCD
The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism
1890-1916 By Ben Levitas Clarendon Press, 265pp. £35