Synge’s early engagement with the work of Charles Darwin and his academic knowledge of comparative science had a profound impact on his work.Footnote 1 During his Parisian stays in the 1890s, Synge studied cultural anthropology with Celticists such as Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville at the Sorbonne and, as has been noted by critics, ‘the methodology he learnt there “took”’Footnote 2 and left traces on his own writing. While sojourning on the Aran Islands, Synge consigned everything he saw and heard to notebooks, which he then reworked into a narrative partaking of the travelogue, the autobiography and ethnographical recording. This was The Aran Islands, which became in turn the basis for most of his plays.Footnote 3 When writing to John Masefield about the publication of his manuscript, Synge highlights the congruence between The Aran Islands and Riders to the Sea and, incidentally, reveals his awareness of the marketization of cultural goods in the process: ‘If the I. N. [Irish National] Theatre does my little Aran play in London in the spring, it would make good advertisement for the book if it was ready. However that is a matter for the publisher.’Footnote 4 In the introductions and prefaces to his works, Synge repeatedly proclaims the truthfulness of his account and transcription of Irish country people’s cultural practices and manners of speaking.Footnote 5 His emphatically insisting on ‘inventing nothing, and changing nothing’Footnote 6 contributes to affirming the transparency of his position as an observer. In his essay ‘J. M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time’, W. B. Yeats remarks on Synge’s qualities of observation, which he qualifies as ‘long unmeditative watching’. Yeats also underlines Synge’s desire for transparency or invisibility: ‘He told me once that when he lived in some peasant’s house, he tried to make those about him forget that he was there, and it is certain that he was silent in any crowded room.’Footnote 7
Synge’s professed desire for self-erasure is especially perceptible in The Aran Islands, even though it constantly conflicts with an equally strong desire to establish some form of intimate rapport with the islanders.Footnote 8 When evoking the memory of Synge, the people who worked or socialized with him recurrently highlight his discretion and propensity to position himself as a spectator. For instance, actress Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh (aka Mary Walker), who played Nora Burke in the first production of The Shadow of the Glen, remembers his presence at rehearsal as discreet and unobtrusive: ‘His voice was mellow, low; he seldom raised it. But for his quiet personality he might have passed unnoticed at any gathering. During rehearsals of his play, he would sit quietly in the background, endlessly rolling cigarettes.’Footnote 9 In his recollections of Synge, John Masefield insists on his being a ‘looker-on at life’: ‘His manner was that of a man too much interested in life about him to wish to be more than a spectator […]. His place was outside the circle, gravely watching, gravely summing up, with a brilliant malice, the fools and wise ones inside.’Footnote 10 But Synge’s outsider’s position reads very differently according to its circumstance: in a theatre box, a London salon or an Aran cottage. In an Aran cottage, Synge’s unobtrusive spectating presence participates in the construction of social and cultural difference between the observed and the observing subject. It contributes to the othering of the islanders and effectively amounts to a performative proclamation of Synge’s modernity and of the islanders’ subsequent primitiveness. The reported description of his attempt at making his presence as little felt as possible when he lived ‘in some peasant’s house’ is indeed very much reminiscent of the posture of the silent observer adopted by the first Western ethnographers.Footnote 11
Synge’s writing about the country people of Ireland, and the inhabitants of the Aran Islands in particular, is concomitant with a larger movement of Romantic writing about so-called primitive peoples and with the birth of cultural anthropology and ethnography as academic disciplines. The imperial and historicist tropes of the primitive, backward or premodern were commonly used in anthropological or ethnographical works. Synge himself had regular recourse to these tropes and, as Gregory Castle has aptly demonstrated, Synge’s disclaimer that he added or changed nothing to what he had seen or heard ‘might well serve as an expression of the attitude toward culture that was emerging among anthropologists like A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski in the first decades of the twentieth century’.Footnote 12
By focussing on the material culture which Synge chose for the production of his plays, Riders to the Sea especially, this chapter highlights the degree to which Synge’s work was aligned with a narrative of modernity and progress. It effectively reads Synge’s plays as cultural performances of modernity. By transposing to the Dublin stage objects conjuring rurality and by giving centre-stage to a commodity-poor culture, the plays contributed to generating and articulating a fundamental difference between the modern, urban audience of the Abbey Theatre and the agrarian or fishing communities, which the plays represented. Thus, they participated in the construction and display of cultural difference, which is so central to modernity’s agenda. The chapter pays special attention to Synge’s quest for or recreation of the authentic and argues that this should be situated within the broader context of the commodity culture emerging in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland. It also relates Synge’s work for the theatre to other art practices – notably, photography – that were similarly informed by an equally strong ethnographical desire to document the lives of putatively primitive people.
1.1 The ‘Real’ Thing
The claim for transparency that Synge made as an observer of the cultural practices of rural Ireland transmuted into no less strong a claim for authenticity when he started to write and direct his plays. When preparing for the 1906 Abbey tour of Britain, for example, Synge wrote to Lady Augusta Gregory expressing his wish that Molly Allgood, who had been given the role of Cathleen in Riders to the Sea, ‘should learn to spin so that there may be no fake about the show’.Footnote 13 Synge was very particular about the material culture of rural Ireland that he intended to be put on stage.Footnote 14 Since ‘real’ objects are believed to be conductive to truthful acting and would ensure that there was ‘no fake about the show’, Synge unsurprisingly insisted on authenticity when it came to the props and costumes to be used in the productions of his plays.
To evoke a well-known anecdote, Synge pressed Lady Gregory to secure an original western Irish peasant spinning wheel for the first Dublin production of Riders to the Sea and when, two years later, the spinning wheel needed to be replaced as the Abbey prepared to tour Britain, he expressed his desire that the replacement to be used on the British stage should be equally authentic. On 7 May 1906 he thus wrote to Lady Gregory, asking her to procure another spinning wheel ‘down there’ (i.e. in Gort, Co. Galway): ‘Wareing is very anxious that we should have our properties costumes etc as perfect as possible. But our spinning [wheel] has practically given out so I think we [should] have another spinning wheel if you could perhaps find one down there’.Footnote 15 Underlying Synge’s request lay the assumption that the original artefact could be replaced every time the need arose. But as we shall see in more detail in Section 1.6, in his fastidious quest for the authentic and his presumption that it could be exchanged or remade, Synge displayed a feature of modernity.Footnote 16
When reporting to Yeats on the preparatory work for the first performance of Riders to the Sea, Lady Gregory dwells on the gathering of the props at some length:
I am distracted trying to get Synge’s ‘properties’ together for staging Riders to the Sea. I luckily took the flannel myself to the Gort dyer, and found he was going to use Diamond dyes instead of madder, and only 2lbs. arrived. No real Aran caps can be got so far, or tweed. I am trying to stir Synge up to go to big shops and look for something near it, and get as little as possible for this time and the real stuff after, for Riders to the Sea will probably be a stock piece for a long time and ought to be well staged. However, I am promised a spinning wheel tomorrow.Footnote 17
We, Synge and I, are still struggling with the things for his play. He has to deal with Aran Islanders, I with nuns, and I do think they might run a race backwards! However, yesterday, ‘An ass and car went into the country’ and brought back the spinning wheel in triumph, and it has been sent off by the nuns, but the red petticoats aren’t ready yet […].Footnote 18
While debunking the nuns’ contribution and exposing her religious and class prejudices, the taunting, hyperbolic style which Gregory uses in the second letter, dated 24 February 1904, presents her quest, and Synge’s, for objects deemed adequate for the staging of Riders to the Sea as a dexterous achievement. Ironically the Aran Islanders, celebrated in the play, are depicted as a hindrance to the theatrical project – as are the nuns for that matter. Overcoming their refractory ways is presented as no mean feat. If the alleged ‘triumph’ with which the spinning wheel was brought back is sarcastically mocked, the word ‘triumph’ nevertheless serves to add symbolical value to the artefact: the more obstacles surmounted, the more distance covered in the wildest countryside with the most primitive means of transport to procure it, the more authentic and therefore precious the find. The nuns’ ‘triumph’ is also Gregory’s and Synge’s for procuring such a rarity. The inverted commas that Gregory uses in her first letter, written earlier in February 1904, to refer to the ‘properties’ highlight an intentional desire to blur the distinction between the theatrical and the real.
One of the questions raised by the recourse to such authentic props is that of the relationship of the theatre to the document. Gregory’s rhetoric pits the natural against the artificial, the real against the imitation and the authentic against the mass-produced. Madder is thus preferred to Diamond dyes, even if their ‘true colours’ were advertised as being ‘as reliable as gold’.Footnote 19 ‘Real Aran caps’ or ‘tweed’ will be sought after as opposed to the more easily accessible commodities for sale in department stores. Yet in Gregory’s eyes, pragmatism had to override aesthetic concerns and the authentic was to be recreated if need be: ‘I am trying to stir Synge up to go to big shops and look for something near it, and get as little as possible for this time and the real stuff after.’
The programme for the Abbey production of Riders to the Sea at the Cardiff Theatre Royal on 17 May 1906 presents the quest for the ‘real thing’ as central to the theatrical project and advertises the work of the company as follows:
The four authors who contribute to this Repertoire have gone direct to the land for their study, and their labours have resulted in a series of Folk Plays which show the Irish peasants and fisher folk exactly in their natural habit as they live.
For instance, Mr. W. B. Yeats spent most of his childhood in the little town of Sligo, where the people of the surrounding country still see the fairies, but only speak of them to their friends.
Mr. Synge produced his powerful little drama, ‘Riders to the Sea,’ after six months on the islands of Aran off the west coast of Ireland, and all the incidents that go to build up the story became known to him during his stay.
Lady Gregory lives in Co. Galway, and the merry comedies from her pen are also the result of personal knowledge and experience, while it is Mr. Boyle’s proud boast that he was born and bred in an Irish cabin.
The Folk Play needs a special kind of acting, and the Company selected to interpret the programme are all familiar with the ways of the Irish peasantry, and in their acting take care to keep close to the actual movements and gestures of the people. Their costumes and their properties are not the haphazard collection from the theatre store, but thoroughly appropriate and accurate, while the scenes in which they play are actual replicas of some carefully-chosen original; for, as much as these plays are portions of Irish life, so are they put upon the stage with a care and accuracy of detail that has hardly been attempted before.Footnote 20
The ethnographical nature of the work that went into the writing of the ‘Folk Plays’ is explicitly stated in the first sentence of the excerpt and is implicitly presented as adding value to the repertoire produced. The four authors’ geographical connection with rural Ireland, through their birthplace or a prolonged sojourn, is supposed to establish their credentials and guarantee their unquestionably intimate, first-hand knowledge of the ‘Irish peasants and fisher folk’. Not only is the authors’ externality as regards the culture which they present as having inspired their work not acknowledged, but it is turned into its opposite: ‘personal knowledge and experience’. Issues of class, religion and gender informing their viewpoints are conveniently ignored. So are their mediating roles, the necessarily subjective and impressionistic nature of their artistic productions and the elements of fantasy that informed their conception or imagination of rural Ireland. What is emphasized instead is the accuracy of their putative reproductions. The attention to detail and the verisimilitude of the aspects of Irish life put on the stage are also highlighted. At no point does the rhetoric betray any awareness of the authors’ contributing to essentializing the ‘Irish peasants and fisher folk’ in a manner which inverts, yet ironically reproduces the manner in which they were essentialized by the colonial power. The irony is all the stronger as the programme was destined for a British audience. In the illustrated, souvenir programme designed for the 1906 Abbey tour of Britain, the note on the authors replicates the othering of the Irish country people quite literally:
In the Prose plays in the Repertoire of the National Theatre Society the writers have broken away altogether from the traditional stage life of Ireland, as it was brought into fashion by Boucicault and his numerous followers, and have taken their types and scenes direct from Irish life itself. This life is rich in dramatic materials, while the Irish peasantry of the hills and coast speak an exuberant language, and have a primitive grace and wildness, due to the wild country they live in, which gives their most ordinary life a vividness and colour unknown in more civilised places.Footnote 21
While Boucicault’s Stage Irishman is rejected in the name of true Irishness, another stage Irish character-type that bears striking resemblances with its predecessor is simultaneously ushered in. The exuberance of the language and the ‘wildness’ of the comportment are characteristically associated with the stage Irish of the nineteenth century. The text is careful to distinguish between the peasantry and other social classes and between urban and rural Ireland. Once these distinctions have been established and it is clear that the authors and their peers are excluded from the description that follows, the text happily orientalizes the ‘Irish peasantry of the hills and coast’. All the tropes formerly used by the colonial power are then recycled; prominent amongst those tropes is environmental determinism. Primitivism and wildness are only tempered by the supposed ‘grace’ of the Irish, which adds a Romantic touch to the description, echoing as it does Romantic artists’ idealized vision of rural life.
After the Abbey tour of Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool, which took place in April 1906, Synge wrote an article entitled ‘The Dramatic Movement in Ireland’. The article was intended for the Manchester Guardian but was never published. Ann Saddlemyer’s edited transcription shows that it may be read as an earlier version of the booklet published as the souvenir programme of the Abbey’s May to July 1906 tour of Britain, or, in any case, that ‘Synge may well have had a hand’ in the writing of the said programme.Footnote 22 The similarities between the two texts are striking with Synge’s article endorsing Yeats’s views and quoting directly from him:
“The plays will differ from those produced by associations of men of letters in London and in Paris because times have changed, and because the intellect of Ireland is romantic and spiritual, rather than scientific and analytical, but they will have as little of a commercial ambition.”Footnote 23
Synge’s unpublished article aims at distancing the Irish national theatre from European art theatres, while simultaneously claiming the same anti-commercialism that has come to be associated with these art theatres or the repertory movement. The spuriousness of argument put forward to establish the specifically Irish characteristics of the plays is very much reminiscent of Matthew Arnold’s critical prose on the Celts, for example.Footnote 24
In the programme for the 1906 production of Riders to the Sea at Cardiff’s Theatre Royal, the importance of faithful replication is stressed several times: ‘Their costumes and their properties are not the haphazard collection from the theatre store, but thoroughly appropriate and accurate, while the scenes in which they play are actual replicas of some carefully-chosen original’. The phrase ‘actual replica’ points to the oxymoronic nature of the project, which aimed at reproducing authenticity and at showing the real on stage. The programme notes emphatically reject the theatrical and its fortuity in favour of appropriateness and accuracy. What Lady Gregory mockingly referred to as the nuns’ ‘triumph’ in her letter to W. B. Yeats in 1904 was implicitly used in the 1906 programme to advertise the quality of the Abbey production of Riders to the Sea. Not only was the authenticity of the properties and the costumes an integral part of the performance, but it became the crux of the performance insofar as the programme was meant to arouse the audience’s curiosity for the ‘authentic’ or ‘accurate’ material culture of rural Ireland that was to be displayed on the stage. One feels that a gasp of admiration was almost expected to be heard when the curtain rose and the objects were displayed. The remoteness of their provenance and their rarity were essential to transform them into curios.
The history of the objects too was emphasized. Thus, the souvenir programme for the 1906 Abbey tour of Britain amusingly specifies: ‘The spinning wheel, for instance, was in use near Gort for over a hundred years till it was bought by Lady Gregory.’Footnote 25 The displacement of the object from its ‘use’ setting is put into relief. In this respect, the locating and dating of the spinning wheel would not be out of place beside an ethnographical museum display. The programme pits a tradition of home-based use dating from times immemorial (‘over a hundred years’) against the very modern gesture of a monetary transaction. The spinning wheel is thus presented as belonging to a unified, essential time predating its entry into modernity. From a utilitarian artefact performing an essential function in a subsistence economy, the spinning wheel has been transformed into a cultural commodity. In effect its entrance into a monetary economy, like its entrance into a performance space where its main function became mostly iconic or symbolic, signalled the obsolescence of the culture that it was a part of. An artistic project intent on staging authenticity thus transformed the theatre stage into a museum-like exhibitionary space where rural Ireland was re-created on stage through its material culture. After the Gort spinning wheel, the programme notes mention ‘wooden vessels’ from the Aran Islands, ‘pampooties’ from Aran also, ‘turf baskets and panniers […] from the extreme west of Kerry’. The accumulative effect produced by the listing of the objects and their provenance highlights the resemblance of the stage to an ethnographical museum and gives the impression that western Ireland could be reproduced through a few of its iconic artefacts.
By essence a theatre stage and a museum radically differ, especially as regards their relation to time, the museum having to do with the accumulation of time,Footnote 26 while the stage is concerned primarily with the fleeting present of the performance. However, in the context of the nationalist project supported by the Abbey directors, the display of authentic, rural artefacts signalled the incommensurability of the culture that these artefacts stood for and that was also symbolized by one of the most prominent institutions of Ireland’s modernity: the National Theatre. But the material culture of the ‘Irish peasants and fisher folk’, as reflected through the cracked looking glass of the dominant culture, served to highlight the distance between these ‘peasants and fisher folk’ and the audience. In Gone Primitive, Marianna Torgovnick pertinently remarks that in an ethnographical museum the display cases mark the objects as valuable and materialize the distance between the spectator and them. Meant to be looked at from afar, the objects are aestheticized, but the highly questionable ideological basis for their presence in the museum is conscientiously hidden from view.Footnote 27 When specifying the means of acquisition of the spinning wheel, the Abbey programme notes in effect highlight the ideological basis for the presence of the wheel on stage. In this, the staging of the facsimile material culture of rural Ireland on the metropolitan stage contributed to accelerating the disappearance of that culture or, at least, affirmed its irremediable demise. That disappearance was the price to pay for the salvaging-like enterprise of a modern, national, ‘truly Irish’ repertory theatre.
When faced with the material culture of rural Ireland, urban spectators were confirmed in their spectating function and could measure the distance that separated them from this antiquated mode of living. On the Dublin stage the spinning wheel was thus turned into an icon of exoticism and pastness. It came to symbolize everything that had to be left behind in the name of progress and modernity: subsistence economy; collectively-produced work (women visiting friends or relatives would sit at their wheel and spin for them); the indistinction of labour and leisure; the porousness of the frontier between the public and the private (the home as shown in Riders to the Sea is open to the gathering of the community at large and not narrowly conceived of as a private, family-oriented sphere only); orality (spinning in the literal sense was also the occasion for the metaphorical spinning of a story, which the opening of Riders to the Sea beautifully translates into theatrical terms, transmuting as it does the literal into the figurative and allowing the story to begin only when Cathleen has started spinning at the wheel); the potential empowerment of women of different generations within a space of expression and dialogue, which was far more productive than is implied by the stigmatization of oral culture as little more than an old superstitious crone’s gossip. As David Lloyd reminds us in his introduction to Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800–2000, it is only when perceived through the normative prism of historicism, that orality becomes synonymous with atavistic reproductions and is opposed to any idea of progress: ‘From […] a historicist perspective […], orality shelters the unemancipated subject while literacy is the condition of possibility for discrimination, reflection, interiority, development: the categories of the ethical and fully historical subject of freedom.’Footnote 28 The opposition between orality and literacy and the equation of literacy with history and freedom are all the more damaging in a colonial context such as the Irish one. If Riders to the Sea is no advocate for colonialism, its narrative and initial mise-en-scène nonetheless presents the oral cultural space inhabited by the Aran Islanders and the communal values it supported as no sustainable alternative to the modernity which Britain incarnated and which the majority of Irish nationalists embraced. Inasmuch as the spinning wheel stood for this communal, oral space and challenged the regulation of time and space that modernity imposed, it became a marker of cultural difference.
1.2 The Authentic at Home and Abroad
The British audiences to which the detailed programme notes discussed above were intended had no need to be confirmed in their sense of their own modernity. The Abbey directors, however, were in great need to showcase theirs. That was one of the functions of the programme notes. The notes were also aimed at giving British audiences cultural background information as to the significance of the Irish material culture exhibited on the stage and were a way of advertising the Irishness of the Abbey productions: the plays were described as ‘Irish Plays’ dealing with Irish matters and performed by Irish actors. As Richard Cave points out in his analysis of the Abbey tours in Britain,Footnote 29 how one interprets the reception of the Abbey productions largely depends on the precise location of the venues and the composition of the audience. Depending on the city and the venue, the proportion of Irish immigrants and their descendants in the audience would have varied. The souvenir programme of the Abbey tour in Britain,Footnote 30 which took place between 26 May and 9 July 1906, lists Cardiff, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Hull as the places the company visited.Footnote 31 The Abbey had already performed in Oxford, Cambridge and London from 23 to 30 November 1905 and toured in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool from 23 to 30 April 1906.Footnote 32 Given the large proportion of Irish immigrants in the industrial cities of northern England, one would expect the coming of a company advertising itself as truly Irish to have had a bigger impact there than in places such as Cambridge or Oxford. In his 1929 history of Ireland’s National Theatre, Dawson Byrne quotes Manchester as having been ‘visited with great success’.Footnote 33 He does not, however, offer any further precision as to the nature of the success. Was the production successful in artistic terms? In financial terms? Or had success to do with the intensity of the applause and the propriety of the audience’s behaviour? In a city like Manchester, where the Irish immigrant community would have been exposed to nationalist projects of a far more radical nature than the Abbey’s, protests might have been feared, which in all probability is what partly motivated Byrne’s remark concerning the success of the Abbey’s visit.Footnote 34 The bourgeois venue, however, would have safeguarded the company from the massive presence of radical, working-class Irish nationalists in the audience and from their potentially tempestuous reactions to the company’s political agenda. Hardly an advertisement for popular culture and popular audiences, Midland Hall, where the company performed, was part of the luxurious Midland Hotel, which had opened in 1903.Footnote 35 Besides its own concert hall, the hotel boasted of a palm court, a winter garden, a roof garden and Russian and Turkish baths.Footnote 36 As such it would have catered mainly for the prosperous middle class, which T. H. S. Escott identifies as the main theatregoers in pre-World War One Britain.Footnote 37 If the INTS explanatory programme notes were useful for the cultural input they brought to an audience most likely ignorant of the material culture of rural Ireland, they also had an important political function as they advocated a mild nationalism, as opposed to other more incendiary nationalist variants.
Assuming, as Richard Cave does, that there was a relatively important proportion of Irish expatriates in the audience of the British venues that the INTS performed in, it is highly unlikely that the programme notes would have ‘promote[d] anticipations of nostalgia, of recognition, a perception […] of difference, since what the plays would attempt to render was a faithful representation of what to expatriates might well be a remembered lifestyle or one recalled as a subject of family history. The difference was that this representation promised no degree of travesty, no traducing or manipulating of experience to suit a colonial agenda; rather, the company’s objective was empowering to an expatriate audience through staging plays with a fit decorum which respected the peasantry as subject’.Footnote 38 If the peasantry was respected as subject matter for the plays, as an autonomous subject capable of speaking for itself, it certainly was not. As such, the Abbey’s objective could hardly have been ‘empowering to an expatriate audience’. Quite the opposite in fact, as what was advocated by the narrative of a play such as Riders to the Sea, for instance, was the resigned acceptance of the tragic but irrevocable loss of a culture whose values were incommensurate with those of a modern audience. Faced with the creation of a social elite’s imagination of the Irish peasantry, expatriate spectators were likely to experience alienation and incomprehension, rather than nostalgia or recognition. Furthermore, the sense of nostalgia that is frequently evoked when dealing with the Irish emigrants’ remembrance of the countryside they had left behind obscures the harsh living conditions that had led them to emigrate in the first place. Citing Kerby Miller’s 1986 analysis of Irish emigration, Luke Gibbons shows how ‘the backward look towards a peasant arcadia does not represent a form of continuity with the rural past of the emigrant, but a break with it. The shock of the city and the new world resulted in a dislocation rather than a continuation of the emigrant’s previous rural experience’.Footnote 39
The sense of misrecognition would have been equally strong, if not stronger, for non-metropolitan, provincial audiences in Ireland,Footnote 40 as they were confronted with what they must have perceived as the product of an urban sensibility, rather than the genuine representation of rural Ireland. Correspondence between the Abbey directors reveals just how attentive they were to the reaction of country town audiences to their productions. In 1906, the same year when the Abbey toured in Britain, the company visited WexfordFootnote 41 and Dundalk, where it played twice. The first of these Dundalk performances took place on 17 March with a programme that included The Pot of Broth (W. B. Yeats, 1902), Cathleen ni Houlihan (W. B. Yeats and Augusta Gregory, 1902) and The Eloquent Dempsey (William Boyle, 1906). Two days after the performance Synge wrote to Augusta Gregory, informing her that the company had played to ‘a tremendous house in Dundalk – the largest [it had] ever played to in Ireland – but [the] reception was not very good. The Pot of Broth failed absolutely and there was no applause at all when the curtain came down although it was an excellent performance’.Footnote 42 What made the performance excellent in Synge’s eyes was the exceptional quality of the acting: W. G. Fay, who played the Tramp in The Pot of Broth, had never been ‘better’ and Sara Allgood ‘was wonderful’ in the role of the Poor Old Woman in Cathleen ni Houlihan. Of The Eloquent Dempsey, whose author, William Boyle, was originally from Dundalk, Synge simply wrote that it ‘got through with a certain amount of applause here and there and […] an interested house’. Synge’s letter then returns to the poor quality of the reception, insisting on the lack of applause: ‘A number of people were very enthusiastic about [Miss Allgood] and the play [i.e. Cathleen ni Houlihan], but there was hardly any applause at the end, and one did not feel any real enthusiasm (apart from one or two political outbursts) – in the house.’ Synge judged that ‘the audience was quite different from any [the company had] played to yet, very intelligent, ready to be pleased, but very critical, and, of course, not perfectly cultured – Dr. Bunbury was a favourite!’Footnote 43 The letter then states that the company was invited to perform again in Dundalk in May during race week and shows Synge devising a programme which might win the audience over: William Boyle’s The Building Fund (1905), Augusta Gregory’s Spreading the News (1904) and his own Riders to the Sea (1904). On 15 May 1906, when the company played in Dundalk for the second time, Yeats expressed his anxiety to Synge in a letter he sent from Coole Park: ‘Please let us know how things go at Dundalk – I am really anxious [about] country places, so much depends on them’.Footnote 44 Two days later he wrote again, expressing his discontent at the report he must have received:
Dundalk is bad, but after all it tells us nothing that we didn’t know before. The country towns in Ireland are mainly animal, but can sometimes be intoxicated into a state of humanity by some religious or political propagandist body, the only kind of intellectual excitement they have got used to. I should think we ought to go back to Dundalk tolerably soon when we have a spare time offering profit sharing terms to the Young Ireland Society, and avoiding race weeks when there is too much country about the country.Footnote 45
Clearly the reception of the Abbey’s second Dundalk performance was as cool as the first. Synge’s appraisal of the first Dundalk failure is expressed in much milder terms than Yeats’s reaction to the second. Yet it too is free of self-criticism. The lack of ‘culture’ or discernment of the audience is used as an excuse for invalidating the country people’s reluctance to adhere to the vision of rural Ireland imposed on them by an intellectual elite. If the Abbey directors could boast of their intimate knowledge of rural Ireland in programme notes destined for a British audience, it was far more difficult for them to make the same self-assured claim when touring ‘country places’ in Ireland. Much therefore in these ‘country places’ ‘depended on’ the audience’s acceptance of the Abbey’s portrait of itself. The material culture may have seemed to have travelled a lesser distance than when the plays were performed in Dublin or Britain, but the dislocation effect, and the discrepancy between the country audiences’ sense of themselves and the Abbey’s fantasied version, must have seemed all the stronger.
Moreover, contrary to what the Abbey directors’ letters seem to imply, early twentieth-century Dundalk was not a cultural desert and its population would have been well acquainted with different kinds of theatre. Fiona Fearon points out how vibrant the town’s theatre scene was: companies touring along a Cork–Dublin–Belfast axis would often stop there; London West-End comedies, farces and musicals were frequently given;Footnote 46 Shakespeare’s plays were occasionally performed; day trips to Dublin’s popular forms of entertainment were organized on a regular basis and the town had particularly lively amateur theatre communities.Footnote 47
Furthermore, the seemingly surprising reaction of the Dundalk audience to what Synge described as the Abbey’s ‘excellent performance’ highlights the degree to which a theatrical performance, whose reception is always intrinsically local, can be at variance with a national(ist) theatre project.Footnote 48 As they rubbed against the grain of the Abbey directors’ conception of Ireland’s nationalist cultural identity, the local specificities of the Dundalk audience were dismissed as ‘bad’. The terms of Yeats’s 17 May letter testify to the violence of the dismissal. The reaction of the Dundalk audience to the Abbey’s agenda was not exceptional, however. Mark Phelan has shown that the nationalist narrative of the Irish National theatre was indeed frequently undercut ‘by its local performance/reception in regions resistant to its centralised nationalist narrative’.Footnote 49 That a significant part of the Dundalk audience was engaged politically is evident from the political outbursts which Synge points out. That its conception of Irish nationalist cultural identity diverged from the Abbey’s is evident in its lack of ‘real enthusiasm’ to the supposedly ‘excellent performance’.
1.3 Theatrical Dislocations
In his account of the Abbey’s first Dundalk production, Synge showed little awareness of the potential resistance of a local performance to a national(ist) agenda. He was, however, very conscious of the concrete consequences of the displacement of the material culture of rural Ireland onto the metropolitan stage, which he meticulously assessed. When writing to W. F. Trench in February 1904 to thank him for the sample of cloth he had sent him in preparation for the production of Riders to the Sea, Synge compared the memory he had of the colour of the material to the samples he had just received:
My dear Sir,
I received your letter and the patterns a day or two ago, and I am greatly obliged for the kind help you have given us. The Leenane stuff comes very near the general effect of the darker shades the men wear on Inishmaan and will do excellently for some of the clothes. I am in hopes of matching it somewhere in Dublin and if that cannot be done we will get it from Leenane direct.
The real Aran stuff is, of course, much bluer, but I think it is the proportion of the white wool and the roughness of the texture that will tell on the stage by lamp-light, rather than the exact shade of the dark thread. […] It was very kind of you to take so much trouble about the caps. Those I remember on the island were certainly dull in colour but that may have been largely due to the effect of the turf-smoke and salt-water.Footnote 50
Behind an expression of satisfaction with the suitability of the patterns that ‘will do excellently’ lies a sense that they fail to exactly match Synge’s expectations. Expressions such as ‘very near’ or ‘much bluer’ hint at the forever elusive nature of the ‘real (Aran stuff)’, which resists or exceeds reproduction. When contrasting the visual effect the cloth produced on Inishmaan to the one it would produce on a theatre stage or when comparing the colour of the caps to the one he had in his mind’s eye, Synge was actually coming up against the incommensurate distance between the ‘real Aran stuff’ and the image he had constructed of it, on the one hand, and between the real and the theatrical, on the other. The letter expresses an impression of misrecognition and sets into relief the element of fantasy which played a powerful part in Synge’s visual (re)construction of the Aran Islands. It also foregrounds the dislocating effects inherent in a project of ‘authentic reproduction’Footnote 51 of rural Ireland on a metropolitan stage. It does so by pointing to a series of literal displacements: ‘the Leenane stuff’Footnote 52 replaced ‘the real Aran stuff’ and was in turn to be replaced by a near-match, expected to be found further afield, in Dublin. When ‘on the stage by lamp-light’, the material was also bound to suffer metaphorical displacements: as it became theatrical, it invariably gained an inauthentic or artificial dimension. The theatricalization of the material also allowed for a multiplicity of symbolic interpretations to come and interfere with its pure iconicity. The question of what constituted reality was repeatedly raised by the paratexts accompanying the staging of Synge’s plays such as the Abbey Theatre programmes, the prefaces to his plays, his public responses to the audiences’ reactions and Yeats’s many and various interventions.
The contentious nature of the answer to the question of what constituted reality notoriously resulted in protests when The Playboy was first produced. In his theatrical project Synge was again and again confronted with the unsustainability of a project intent on staging authenticity. The quest for authenticity was a preoccupation Synge shared with naturalist artists, who expected their audience to take the mise-en-scène for reality and equate the signifier with the signified. As Aoife Monks reminds us in The Actor in Costume, the Naturalist movement grappled with the recalcitrance of real substances and objects, which ‘kept on insisting on becoming theatrical’ when put on the stage and were thus incapable of fulfilling the function that artists had assigned them, that is, triggering some inner transformation of the audience and the actors while exposing them to the real.Footnote 53
Putting authentic objects or costumes on the early-twentieth-century Dublin stage amounted to reasserting the distance (temporal, spatial and affective) between the audience and the communities represented in the plays.Footnote 54 It also affirmed the incommensurability of these communities’ values or ways-of-being and the audience’s. That very distance was what made valuable the poor material culture of rural Ireland or even its ‘authentic reproduction’ if the practical realities of a performance necessitated it. The ‘authentic’ props or costumes were only valued as remnants or vestiges of a purportedly dying, primitive culture. Displayed on the Abbey stage, their remoteness was magnified. They came to symbolize the irremediable pastness of the culture of which they were an emanation. As such they served to confirm the audience in its sense of its own modernity. To some degree, therefore, the display of true artefacts or (non)props, which the 1906 programme for the Abbey production of Riders to the Sea at Cardiff’s Theatre Royal emphatically advertised as not ‘coming from the haphazard collection of the theatre store’, bespoke the imminent death of the culture put on stage. The narrative of Riders to the Sea points to such ineluctable cultural loss. If not for its theatricality and the potentially subversive power of the performances it contains, the play could be viewed as partaking only of a folklorist ‘salvaging’ enterprise, which purported to preserve a ‘vanishing’ culture while simultaneously signalling its imminent death. But the performance of the play, and the performative practices that it contains, potentially contradict the narrative and allow for the cultural practices presented as doomed to live on.Footnote 55
1.4 Modern Visuality vs. Primitive Smells
As we have seen, Synge had an extremely precise idea of the visual effect he wanted to achieve with costumes. Ordering different samples of flannel cloth, Synge balanced the memories he had of colours and textures on the Aran Islands with the effect they would produce on stage when lit by a lamp. As for shoes, these highly charged markers of class and (pre)modernity,Footnote 56 Synge asked his Aran island friend Michael Costello to send real pampooties, the home-made, cow-hide moccasins worn by the islanders who did not go barefoot. Those true-to-life props are more than one-dimensional markers of verisimilitude or authenticity and carry a whole range of meanings, whose complexity has not yet fully been explored.
The insertion of authentic artefacts in the mise-en-scène of Synge’s plays echoes the preoccupations of naturalists like Émile Zola, who advocated for the ‘great, free air of reality’ to be let in ‘through the backcloth’.Footnote 57 The drama of truth that Zola supported aimed at highlighting the powerful influence of social milieus on human behaviour and Synge’s first play When the Moon Has Set bears unmistakable traces of the influence of this dominant stream of naturalism. Such influence is manifest in Synge’s attempt at denouncing cultural reproduction and exposing the historical and social forces to which individuals are subject, as in Colm and Eileen running the risk of repeating the tragic story of Colm’s uncle and Mary Costello because of class and religious difference. In this, the thematic preoccupation of When the Moon Has Set overrides any concern with the material culture needed for the staging.
The impact of Naturalism proved much more felicitous in Synge’s peasant plays: in their underlying Darwinism, in the acting style which was to be favoured for their production and in Synge’s preference for the true-to-life props for their staging. This dismissal of trompe l’oeil and the fake had much in common with the aesthetic choices of French theatrical director André Antoine whose work at the Théâtre-Libre matched Zola’s naturalist preoccupations. His insertion of real chunks of meat in his 1888 production of Fernand Icres’s Les Bouchers (The Butchers) has remained famous. Antoine’s slice of life productions held a mirror to the spectators, forcing them to face an unvarnished depiction of themselves (or their close relatives) and their environment (or the one they had left when moving to Paris), an experience which did not always go down well as some critics’ outraged reactions testify. Critic Jules Lemaître, for instance, expressed his disgust and deep disapproval of Antoine’s choice to have recourse to real stacks of hay in his 1892 production of Paul Anthelme Bourde’s La Fin du vieux temps (The End of the Old Times). In his review Lemaître used the word ‘pestilence’ to convey his resentment of the mouldy stench which filled the auditorium and compelled the audience to pinch their noses.Footnote 58 The word ‘pestilence’ conjures up images of infectious diseases and echoes the preoccupations with sanitation, contagion and degeneracy widespread in fin-de-siècle Europe.
Lady Gregory expressed relief when she learnt that the real pampooties Synge had ordered would not arrive on time for the premiere of Riders to the Sea and were to be replaced by fake ones. In a letter to Yeats, Gregory articulates this relief in terms whose olfactory nature parallels those of the French critic: ‘The pampooties will have to be made in Dublin, a very good thing too, there is no object in bringing local smells into the theatre.’Footnote 59 Antoine’s hay stacks and Synge’s pampooties epitomize a rural culture which both Lemaître’s review and Lady Gregory’s letter stigmatize as primitive or other. ‘Pestilence’ and ‘local smells’ are stereotypical markers of class and ethnicity and, in this, Lady Gregory’s letter establishes a clear distinction between rusticity and urbanity and between the local and the national. It highlights Gregory’s rejection of too strong a form of localism and reveals her conception of theatre as necessarily national.Footnote 60 Moreover, if smells carry a whole range of cultural meanings, they also possess the ability to break the fourth wall. Whereas the sense of sight, which a theatrical performance mostly relies on, contributes to confirming the distance between the spectator and the actor, smell puts the audience and the actors on a par and evades the barrier between the stage and the auditorium. Lady Gregory’s suspicious attitude towards local smells brings to mind the hierarchy of the senses which modernity established under the influence of the Reformation. As Philip Mellor and Chris Shilling point out, the eye and ear were valued because of their unsullied access to the word of God. Touch and smell, on the other hand, were mistrusted as they partook of the body’s sinfulness.Footnote 61 Culturally, the eye and the ear, the ‘most distanced and objectifying organs’, were also prized. As the modes of disciplining the body characteristic of modernity, they represented, in David Lloyd’s words, ‘the privileged vehicles of culture while those senses that mingle the body with its objects, touch and smell and taste, remained tied to the suspect domain of the unruly body’.Footnote 62
Within the enclosed space of a modern playhouse, smells have an immediate effect on the audience: their disruptive, unruly power lies precisely in their assault on the spectators and their challenge to the frame of representation. This is partly what prompted modernists to experiment with smells.Footnote 63 These experimentations remained exceptional, however. The conventions of realism meant that the only senses to cross the fourth wall were sight and sound. If one could imagine the smell of pampooties as an effective way of enhancing realism, what Gregory saw in smells was their potential to jeopardize the project of a modern, national theatre. In her study of ‘olfactory performances’, Sally Banes points out that the ‘deodorization’ of the modern theatre was linked, historically and culturally, to the hygienist campaigns of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries and that the sanitation of the theatre had to do with the period’s association of disease with foul odours.Footnote 64
Moreover, there is something primal, visceral and sensual about smells, which goes against the grain of the modernity supported by the founders of the Abbey Theatre. The experience spectators have of smells is more intimately physical than their perception of sounds or images and doubly so in the case of a smell exuded by an article of clothing directly in contact with the actor’s body. The contact, albeit olfactory, between bodies on stage and bodies in the auditorium must have been sensed as obscene and primitive. Whereas modern spectatorship supposed a form of distancing and alienation, a ‘premodern’, ritual-like theatrical experience would have been inclusive of the audience and would have led to a radical redefinition of what a post-independence Irish community could be like. The presence of ‘local smells’ would have allowed for a somatic communion of actors and spectators and opened up the possibility for the ritual of keening performed on stage to cross the stage–auditorium divide and for the whole theatrical experience to be transformed into something much akin to a collective ritual. Such a reading of the power of smells, of course, stands in sharp contrast with Lady Gregory’s, which reduced ‘local smells’ to markers of rusticity and inferior ethnicity. As Banes reminds us, the ethnicity invoked by smells is very often exhibited as ‘exotic’ or ‘other’, and this ‘exotic other is represented as possessing a smelly (or fragrant) identity’.Footnote 65 Politically, in the eyes of the founders of the Abbey Theatre at least, the acknowledgement of the spectator’s agency which smells would have induced, threatened the version of representative democracy that a national theatre promoted, opening up the possibility of a more participatory and democratic assembly.
1.5 Ethnographic Photography
Synge’s insistence on having real pampooties on stage is hardly surprising. As Nicholas Daly demonstrates, the Aran Islands stood in Synge’s eyes for a world of authenticity which allowed him to vent his frustration with metropolitan modernity. The objects he borrowed from the islanders’ material culture for his plays epitomized the flipside of the modernity he was ill-at-ease with. Daly points out that in Riders to the Sea the curtain rises on a home which stands as the opposite of the bourgeois living-room so widespread on the nineteenth-century European stage. In Synge’s play the home is first and foremost a place of production, where characters bake their own bread and spin their own cloth, a place which Dublin and London audiences would have identified as primitive utopia, alien to a consumer economy.Footnote 66 The stocking that allows the identification of Michael’s body bears the traces of Nora’s labour and thus something that exists, or appears to exist outside of the commodity market. ‘Objects are made for use here, rather than exchange. […] Labour is visible and concrete here’, writes Daly, ‘not invisible and abstract’.Footnote 67 But if the pampooties in Riders to the Sea are presented as markers of the premodern, their presence in a theatrical production – for the entertainment of a paying audience – renders them as fetishes of authenticity.
As various critics have remarked, the Aran Islands held a mirror to Synge’s anxieties about his own modernity. David Fitzpatrick shows how Synge’s prose narrative reflects the process of modernization which the islands were undergoing and renders the contradictions emerging in the cultural practices of a people living simultaneously in the premodern and the modern.Footnote 68 Declan Kiberd and, more recently, Justin Carville,Footnote 69 have argued that bringing a clock and a camera to the Aran Islands was a way for Synge to set his own technological modernity into relief by pitting it against the putative primitivism of the islanders. It was also a way to come to terms with a modernity that he himself was ill at ease with. In Carville’s words, ‘[Synge’s] use of the technologies that had introduced new sensory experiences to urban life provided him with the opportunity to engage in the detached observation of their effects, which he himself had not been able to fully rationalize.’Footnote 70 Rural Ireland was therefore a laboratory of modernity: a place where the effects of modernity were tested and observed, but also a place where modernity was performed. In this way, Synge’s ethnographic leaning and his engagement with new technological ways of recording sensory experience, such as photography, may be viewed as active participation in the construction of the visual culture of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century modernity. By photographing people from rural Ireland, Synge collaborated, albeit unconsciously, with the performance of modernity. Indeed by recording country people’s sartorial, social and cultural practices for a bourgeois readership and theatre audience, Synge’s photographs contributed to transforming these practices into curiosities and spectacles. Ethnographic photography also implicitly assumed the imminent disappearance or at least obsolescence of the practices or objects being photographed. The photographic gesture itself was a way of performatively engendering or (re)inventing the modern and its counterpart the premodern simultaneously, while asserting their fundamental difference. Implied by this form of ethnographic photography was the assertion of an imperialist relation between subject and object or self and other: the photographer asserted his position as subject/author of a visual discourse, while the people being photographed were silenced, objectified, ‘othered’.
If Synge commented on the supposed intuitive ability of the islanders (of women especially) to pose for his camera, he kept remarkably silent on the part that he himself played in the visual (and gendered) politics of modernity:
The coming out of the steamer from Galway is marked by much movement on the pier. I recall Petrie’s words that the clothing of the Irish peasant […] has rich positive tints with nothing gaudy. The peasants have a further intuition for picturesque arrangement and each group is in perfect pose for my camera. I have noticed many beautiful girls whose long luxuriant lashes lend a shade to wistful eyes. They are amused to watch while I work my camera and observe keenly on whom I happen to light.Footnote 71
The passage is a very visual rendering of the scene. It testifies to Synge’s acute sensitivity to colours and shades. Yet only the women’s faculty of observation is explicitly exposed. Synge carefully hushes his own reciprocal gaze and veils it behind technological adjustments. The camera becomes a surrogate of Synge’s eye and functions as an ‘optical prosthesis’, to borrow Justin Carville’s words.Footnote 72
The description thus allows for a silencing of desire and a distancing of the whole scene, apprehended as a spectacle in which Synge plays very little or no part at all. Synge’s visual interest in peasants and in the material culture of rural Ireland is by no means exceptional. It is echoed by the works of other photographers of the time, one of whom is particularly interesting for our reading of the cultural meanings of objects such as pampooties: Jane W. Shackleton. A contemporary of Synge’s, Shackleton was, like Synge, interested in markers of (pre)modernity, which figure prominently in her work: industrial sites as well as archaeological remains and people from the West of Ireland, the Aran Islands in particular,Footnote 73 make up the bulk of the subjects of her photographs. Like Synge’s, Shackleton’s eye was caught by objects or materials emblematic of the premodern: spinning wheels, home-spun flannel cloth, pampooties.Footnote 74 In the lecture notes accompanying her photographs of Bridget Mullins at her spinning wheel, for instance, or of Tom Folan and Tom Dirrane riding a donkey on Inis Mór (Figure 1.1), Shackleton emphatically underlines the home-made quality of the footgear and clothes whose material composition is precisely detailed: ‘raw cowhide with the hair outside and fastened over the foot with laces or thongs’, ‘flannel made of wool grown on the island and which has been spun and woven here’.Footnote 75
The articles of clothing are presented as emblematizing premodernity, as the surviving icons of a self-sustained, home-based economy. They also appear as markers of class and gender difference, even though Jane Shackleton never comments on that aspect. About the pupils of Oatquarter School, whom she photographed on Inis Mór in 1906, Shackleton writes perfunctorily: ‘They all look hearty and healthy – very clean and well dressed, mostly in white and red flannel’,Footnote 76 and does not pass any remark on most of the girls going barefoot (Figure 1.2). One cannot help noticing that out of the ten boys sitting in the front row of the boys’ class photograph,Footnote 77 only two do not wear any shoes of any kind, whereas nine out of the eleven girls standing in the front row of the girls’ class are barefoot.Footnote 78 One is also struck by the contrast between the quasi absence of self-consciousness of the young schoolgirls and the acute self-awareness of their elders in a photograph Shackleton took at Dun Aengus on one of her previous visits to Aran, in 1899 (Figure 1.3). The photograph is interesting in that it reveals Shackleton’s blindness to the role she is playing in the spatial arrangement of the scene and the construction of the scene as spectacle.
Shackleton’s blindness is in many ways reminiscent of Synge’s. In his introduction to his compilation of Shackleton’s photographs, Christiaan Corlett compares Shackleton’s work with that of Belfast photographer Robert Welsh, by underlining Shackleton’s absence of prescriptiveness as regards the pose of the people she photographed. The photograph taken at Dun Aengus displays so many signs of being cleverly stage-managed that one cannot but question Shackleton’s supposed lack of prescriptiveness. It shows one middle-aged woman in a doorway and on the left and right hand-sides two young women, in their mid to late teens, whose pose does not owe anything to chance: one is shyly looking down at her bare feet, the other has contrived to hide hers behind a stone. The photograph frames the women in various ways. It balances the horizontality of the lintel, the flat cornerstones, the top of the front and the back walls against the verticality of the front wall, the abutments and the bodies of the three standing women. It creates a sense of symmetry and depth as the doorway opens onto a wall in the background, which is very similar to the one in the foreground, against which the women are staged. The symmetry is reinforced by the gesture of the young woman standing perched on one abutment duplicating that of the older woman standing in the doorway: both look straight at the camera with their left hands on their hips and their right arms dangling. The eye of the viewer is caught by the young woman on the right, who is set apart by her raised position. In her lecture notes, Jane Shackleton remarks once again on the traditional clothes and footwear of the older woman (‘strong stockings of home spun wool, and pampooties, sandal-like shoes of cow skins, the hairy side out’).Footnote 79 She also notices that one of the young women is self-consciously hiding her feet from view. The repeated emphasis Shackleton lays on the home-made quality of the clothes and the singularity of the footwear iconizes them as visual markers of authenticity or premodernity. Pampooties are apprehended as objects of curiosity, turned into exhibits in a cultural spectacle not totally dissimilar to the one that Dubliners were offered in May 1907 when the Irish International Exhibition opened at Ballsbridge. Shackleton’s photographs, like Synge’s, confirm the difference between the photographer, who is constructed as modern by her camera and the photographed subjects, whose primitiveness is highlighted. What may pass as vanity on the part of the young Aran woman trying to conceal her bare feet – Shackleton remarks on the fact that she is not ‘attired in the usual simplicity of the islanders’ – may also be read as self-consciousness and shame or embarrassment at being stigmatized as rustic and poor.
1.6 Authentic Properties and Commodity Culture
By placing the emphasis on a commodity-poor culture, Synge implicitly took issue with what came to be the dominant material and cultural values of bourgeois Edwardian Ireland. Synge frequently expressed his detestation of the middle class by fantasizing a community of fate between the fisher folks of Aran, the marginalized and poor peasants (condemned to disappearance by the modernization of Ireland and the rise of merchant capitalism), and the impoverished, dying Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, of which he was a member. When read with the history of commodity culture in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland in mind, however, Synge’s interest in a preindustrial, commodity-poor culture appears as very typical of his social class’s attitude towards Irish modernity. His reluctance to go to the ‘big shops’ (to borrow Lady Gregory’s words)Footnote 80 to procure near equivalents to Aran caps or tweed for the first production of Riders to the Sea may be seen as a distrust of the department stores, the temples of consumerism which grew in Dublin with the rise of the middle class in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.Footnote 81 Likewise, his rejection of mass-produced goods may be apprehended as a dismissal of commodity-based consumer economy and of all the evils of industrial and capitalist modernity. However, in shunning mass-produced goods, in seeking original, non-industrialized, Irish-made artefacts for the staging of his plays or in idealizing rural Ireland as a counterpoint to Britain and what it stood for in terms of commercialism, Synge was also unwittingly being very modern, echoing Matthew Arnold and sharing a lot of the (upper) middle class’s taste for the authentic. His attitude to material culture also has a lot in common with William Morris.Footnote 82 Indeed, with the growth of the arts and crafts movement, the end of the nineteenth century saw a widespread renewal of interest for the handmade and the local.Footnote 83 Department stores were quick to pick up on that trend, which had started in the 1880s and focussed on locally made rather than imported goods in their advertising campaigns.Footnote 84
The craving for authenticity, which was constructed as an antidote to modern consumerism, may indeed be situated within the larger economic context of the attempts at promoting Irish-made goods, which had recurrently been made since the 1880s. In Commodity Culture and Social Class in Dublin 1850–1916, Stephanie Rains points out how the Dublin-based 1882 Exhibition of Irish Arts and Manufactures differed from the earlier Great Exhibitions which took place in Ireland in that it was distinctly national and not intent on showcasing international goods, as earlier Exhibitions had been.Footnote 85 Rains also shows that the growing feeling amongst European middle-class that their consumption practices were of political significance was reinforced in Ireland by a sense that consumption was linked to national self-determination. A good proportion of the organizers of and contributors to the 1882 Exhibition were Home Rule supporters – even though a fair number of Unionists also sanctioned the event. The divide between supporters of and opponents to the Exhibition was not made along a religious line.Footnote 86 What mattered more than Ireland’s future status was the protection of the interests of the rising elite for whom only a limited conception of national independence was on the cards and the strict adherence of Ireland to capitalist norms was not at risk. The popularity of the ‘native industries’ movement of the 1880s allowed it to become far more influential than a similar campaign launched in the 1850s – the Dublin Traders’ Alliance, which failed completely.Footnote 87 The Home Industries section of the 1907 Irish International Exhibition advertised its exhibits as ‘the products of small undertakings … [and industries which could be] … taken up by the rural populations at a living wage’. The goods listed on the prospectus included ‘hand-woven shirtings, hand-woven damasks … hand-spun wool, hand-spun yarn … hand-made tapestry curtains, hand-made rugs, hand-made carpets’.Footnote 88 Amongst the goods that the Dublin department stores displayed at the Exhibition, culturally significant material such as Irish laces or tweeds figured prominently. Rains underlines the irony of the location as most of the goods displayed in the Palace of Industries, meant to promote local industries, were actually imports into Ireland.Footnote 89 The fact that these goods were icons of Irishness par excellence is no less ironic. In the years leading up to the 1907 Dublin-based International Exhibition, a controversy arose as regards the national vs. international character of the event. The possibility of having two competing exhibitions – one national, the other international – was even evoked before a compromise was reached: an International Exhibition which would give pride of place to native industries.Footnote 90 The aims of such (inter)national exhibitions was clearly to secure the interests of the rising economic elite. Their political and national(ist) significance was secondary to this commercial and capitalist agenda.
Synge wrote at a time when rural Ireland was increasingly marketized. It was turned into a cultural commodity in several World Exhibitions where ideal Irish villages were recreated: in the 1893 Chicago World Fair, for instance, or the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition at White City in London.Footnote 91 As will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, the aim of these Irish villages was primarily to promote Irish-made goods and native industries, but it appears that they also fed the nostalgic crave of modern, urban World Fairs or Exhibitions visitors for a countryside which they saw as an escape from rampant urbanization. This ‘neo-nostalgia’ for the rural (to borrow the term used by Elizabeth Outka in Consuming Traditions), was especially perceptible in the 1908 Franco–British Exhibition.Footnote 92 In Ireland too the quest for authentic, Irish-made goods took the shape of nostalgia for a past which had never existed. Rural Ireland was fantasized as idyllic and the cottage industries advertised as places providing decent wages to contented workers and where goods of superior quality were happily produced. This dehistoricized vision of rural Ireland absolved those many nationalists who adhered to a capitalist, modernizing agenda for Ireland of their responsibilities in the destruction of these cottage industries or home-based, local economies. Synge himself was not immune to this myopia. In his introduction to The Aran Islands, for instance, he deplored the change brought to ‘Kilronan, the principal village on Aranmore […] by the fishing industry, developed there by the Congested Districts Board […]’,Footnote 93 disregarding the fact that the scheme was put in place to allow for the survival of the local fishermen. When, in a letter to his cousin Isabella, he referred to his uncle’s introduction of a fishing trawler to the Aran Islands, he interestingly glossed over the hostility the commercial boat, the Georgina, encountered on the part of local fishermen and the disruption it caused to the area’s fishing economy.Footnote 94
In the years preceding independence, the promotion of Irish-made goods partook of a nationalist, political agenda. What is most important, however, is that these goods were marketed like any other goods in a consumer economy. So, if authenticity was looked for, it was of a kind that existed within the limits of commodity exchange. Synge’s staging of the putatively authentic material culture of Western Ireland, as the Abbey Theatre’s commitment to putting upon the stage ‘unique fac-similes of […] originals’,Footnote 95 are emanations of a larger phenomenon, which started at the turn of the century and consisted in the commodification of the authentic. Authenticity sold very well. In her introduction to Consuming Traditions, Outka calls our attention to the increase of this paradoxical ‘non-commercial commerce’.Footnote 96 Synge’s taste for the authentic and the Abbey Theatre’s project as a whole, therefore, can be seen in this light. Often presented by the directors themselves as removed from any of the market’s preoccupations, they were in actual fact very much in tune with the fashion and the market of the time – at least in their choice of the material culture they put on the stage and their commodification of rural Ireland. Their theatrical project tapped into the widespread cravings for the recreated original and the commercialization of the non-commercial. To some extent, in insisting on the difference between the Abbey’s non-commercial, art-theatre-like aesthetics and the commercially successful melodramas of Boucicault’s, the programme notes for the 1906 Abbey tour of Britain replicated this commercialization of the non-commercial.
This chapter has argued that Synge’s display/recreation of the ‘authentic’ material culture of Western rural Ireland on the metropolitan stage constituted nevertheless a quintessentially modern gesture. Placing ‘real’ objects on stage contributed to othering the culture they stood for. It also marked this culture as both there and not there, as already past or absent. In other words, it encoded it in the process of representation and made it theatrical. Yet, in performance the ‘realness’ or ‘truth’ of objects simultaneously threatens to burst through the frame of representation. The following chapters will explore in detail the ability of performance to resist representation. Indeed, if some aspects of Synge’s poetics were congruent with the agenda of colonial, capitalist modernity, others resolutely brushed against its grain. The relation of Synge’s stage aesthetics to modernity, therefore, needs to be read dialectically: accordingly the following chapters argue that performance represented in Synge’s eyes one of the most effective means of resistance to modernity’s dominant ideology.
