"What's All the Stir About?" Gerald MacNamara, Synge, and the Early Abbey Theatre
Rent from DeepDyveIn November, 1909, a few hundred patrons at the Abbey Theatre sat down to watch a satire by Gerald MacNamara, The Mist that Does Be on the Bog, performed by the Belfast-based Irish Literary Theatre. This company, founded in 1904 by ambitious amateurs, paid annual visits to Dublin with a repertoire of new Irish drama. In The Mist that Does Be on the Bog, MacNamara presents a clever comedy of errors in which Michael and Bridget, two peasant farmers, rent out their Connemara cottage to three Dublin motor tourists. These urban dwellers have come to the West to rehearse a play in line with "the new movement in Ireland," the Irish Revival. The visitors' disguise is mistaken for real by a local tramp—who, in fact, is also a wealthy Dubliner and a poet in search of inspiration. The language of the play, as well as the confrontation between the tourists, the locals, and the poet made fun of the Irish dramatic revival and of the institution that had come to represent this wave of cultural pride, the National Theatre Society, Ltd., at the Abbey.
The play has, at most, limited artistic merits. The dramatic structure is inventive, but flawed, and its characterization is witty but shallow. Yet it warrants attention today for its value as an intertextual critique of realism on the Abbey Theatre stage. As such, MacNamara's satire might be viewed alongside other voices critical of the theater associated with William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Millington Synge. This national institution of drama was frequently held under scrutiny by such journalists as Arthur Griffith of the United Irishman, by cultural critics like Dr. George Sigerson and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, and by such Irish-language activists as Pádraic Pearse. 1 MacNamara, however, provided an assessment of the state of Irish and European drama that was more complex than that of his colleagues. Although contemporary audiences largely failed to recognize the play's criticism underneath its farcical humor, MacNamara [End Page 108] was not merely questioning the boundaries of Irish drama; he was also questioning the limitations imposed by the new wave of realism on the stage. 2
Gerald MacNamara, a pseudonym for Harry Moscow (1865–1938), was a member of the well-known family of painters and decorators who ran a business in Belfast and in D'Olier Street, Dublin. As a comic actor as well as satirical playwright for the Ulster Literary Theatre and for the Theatre of Ireland, MacNamara understood the power, as well as the limitations, of the emerging drama at the Irish National Theatre. 3 To fully understand MacNamara's half-hour satire, the reader must locate it within an international context of modernity and realism on the stage, and place it in the context of the Irish debate concerning the role of a national theater. The Irish peasant dramas that were its target emerged in line with these national and international developments in the theater. The comic potential of The Mist that Does Be on the Bog needs to be addressed in relation to the repertoire of the Abbey Theatre. MacNamara explores the limitations of realistic representation using anti-theatrical features that intentionally break or disrupt dramatic illusion. Finally, we need to realize that MacNamara's critique was not an attack on the drama of John Millington Synge per se, but should rather be regarded as a commentary on the commodification of Irish cultural nationalism. To underpin this, MacNamara lays bare the limitations of realistic representation using antitheatrical features that break or disrupt dramatic illusion. In that regard, a surprisingly postmodern insight in MacNamara's satire emerges: an understanding that conventions of realistic representation play a crucial role in the commodification of landscape and culture.
During the first decade of the twentieth century, the National Theatre Society built upon earlier attempts to establish...
