Chapter 4 investigates the social and political possibilities opened up by the (re)emergence of counter-modern modes of embodiment in the midst of a prominent institution of modernity: a national theatre. It argues that the apparently illegible behavioural patterns of the characters ‒ in The Playboy of the Western World, especially ‒ may be read as tangible traces of forms of embodiment that are incommensurate to modernity. While Synge’s dramatic writing sometimes flirts with stereotypical representations of the Irish body, it does so in order to better submit such representations to critical reappraisal. These forms of embodiment actualize alternative ways of being that both the colonial state and the proponents of middle-class, anti-colonial nationalism strove to suppress. The wild physicality associated with cultural practices, such as keening or faction fighting, stands in sharp contrast to the hegemonic and early twentieth century conception of the modern body. In Synge’s plays, these other expressions of corporeality offer traces of an alternative to the modernity of the (Abbey) theatre as an institution. They register the enduring recalcitrance of peasant popular culture and of ways of being that exist athwart modernity. In this, they allow for a vestigial survival and dissemination of alternative social and cultural possibilities.

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.