Chapter 1 is concerned with the ethnographical leanings of Synge’s work. It focuses on the material culture which Synge chose for the production of his plays, Riders to the Sea especially, and highlights the degree to which Synge’s plays were 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 and more specifically Jane W. Shackleton’s ‒ that were similarly informed by an equally strong ethnographical desire to document the lives of putatively primitive people.

Chapter 3 argues that the cultural and performance practices of the Irish peasantry written into Synge’s plays celebrate the living on of rural Ireland’s residual culture. It focusses on 'keening' ‒ or 'caoineadh' in Irish ‒ in Deirdre of the Sorrows, The Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea. The frame that Synge chose for his adaptation of the ritual of the Irish lament, that is, the stage of an institutional theatre, contributed to some degree in hollowing the practice out of its agency and ran the risk of transforming the ritual into a mere spectacle. However, as keening was part of a performance tradition, it also possessed abilities to resist this form of disempowerment. The stage directions relating to the performance of the lament ritual in the three plays are very much open to interpretation and leave the director free to fashion the performance of the keen as he or she pleases. Depending on the directorial choices then, the performance of the stage keen will either seal the irrevocable loss of a cultural formation or highlight its residual living on and encourage a perception of loss as a creative process, containing germs for a reconfiguration of the collective.

Chapter 5 is concerned with the ways in which Synge’s plays engage with and interrogate the temporal disjunctions of Edwardian Ireland. It highlights the specifically performative means to which Synge has recourse and implicitly contrasts the plays with the ethnographic dimension of his prose record in The Aran Islands. The chapter explores the moments of disrupted linearity in plays such as Riders to the Sea, The Playboy of the Western World and Deirdre of the Sorrows and highlights the ways in which they give theatrical expression to the sense of temporal disjunction, which modernity fostered and which Edwardian Ireland’s colonial situation accentuated. Even though the narratives of Synge’s plays follow a linear pattern and, in that sense, appear to endorse the conception of chronology and time upheld by a dominant modernity, they also leave room for other, alternative temporalities to be explored. Through discordant bodily movements, linearity and its corollary, progress, can be questioned; alternative sequencing can be envisaged and different rhythms allowed to unfold concurrently. Now and again vignettes erupt in Synge’s plays which disrupt the linear flow of time and open up the possibility of other temporal configurations.