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BOOK REVIEWS so, this book will prove useful to readers with interests in Irish studies, literary theory, film studies, and modernism. Greg Winston ________________ Husson College Cultural Nationalism on the Irish Stage Albert J. DeGiacomo. T. C Murray, Dramatist: Voice of Rural Ireland. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003. 196 pp. $29.95 ONE MAY BE hard pressed to find the works of Thomas Cornelius (T C.) Murray (1873-1959) anthologized alongside those of his fellow Irish playwrights Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Lady Gregory, or O'Casey. However, thanks to this short book (167 pages excluding Works Cited and index), readers will come to know everything they wish about "the Catholic realist of the Irish Dramatic movement" whose plays are a testament to strong religious values and an abiding love of the Irish peasants who were his inspiration. The book's six chapters provide the most complete record (indeed, the first and only record) of the man and his works: an overview of Murray's life ("The Schoolmaster Dramatist"); an analysis of most of his plays ("Early, Middle, Experimental, Later"), about fifteen of them; and a brief "Critical Evaluation." Moreover, each play synopsis is followed by a brief interpretation, an appraisal (based on contemporary reviews), and a short production history. The son of successful merchants, T. C. Murray spent most of his life as a well-respected career schoolmaster. And although he lived through tumultuous times—the struggle for Home Rule, the 1916 Easter Rising, the establishment of the Irish Free State—politics do not figure in his work. What we find instead are characters who "yearn to throw off the oppression of land, family, and religion," who are "blinded and constricted by their parochial and domestic needs." Murray reported their oppression very much à la Zola, transcribing the speech of the peasants of his native Cork, and maintaining that each of his plays was a document derived directly from the people he had heard and observed. (It is interesting to note that when he claimed, in a review of O'Casey's Purple Dust [1940], that its characters bore little resemblance to the Irish people he knew, O'Casey published a rebuttal questioning Murray's own peasant sources.) One might say that Murray is nothing if not consistent: the subject matter for his plays comes almost exclusively from Irish rural life; their style and structure are grounded in (and limited to) those of the nineteenth -century well-made plays of Scribe and Sardou, something of 239 ELT 47 : 2 2004 which he was well aware: "I am (to a great extent) a 'bloody realist'—and the school of Pirandello baffles me," he admitted; and they are also consistent in ideology, a leitmotif characterized by DeGiacomo as "the Ibsenite theme of the individual battling against the mainstream of society in order to reach fulfillment." We find this theme from the outset in Murray's first play, Birthright (1910), in which two brothers fight to death over the right to inherit their father's farm. The play created a sensation at the Abbey Theatre and was selected by Yeats and Lady Gregory to form part of the opening bill for the American premiere of the Irish Players in Boston the following year—where Irish-Americans were disturbed at seeing their sentimental recollections of the "old country" destroyed. (In 1914, Murray stated that they were viewing Ireland "through a rose mist.") Many of Murray's characters end up as victims baffled or defeated by social forces beyond their control. The protagonist of Maurice Harte (1912) suffers a mental collapse (perhaps a fatal one; the ending is deliberately ambiguous) resulting from family pressure to enter a priesthood for which he feels no vocation. Here Murray targets what DeGiacomo calls "religious ignorance and the socioreligious mores that conspire to make a peasant family oppress their son." In Sovereign Love (1913), a one-act dark comedy about matchmaking, two young people become the unhappy pawns of their parents' scheming. In The Briery Gap (1914), the subject is premarital sex and "the considerable power of the priest to engender terror in the community": knowing that she will be denounced from the pulpit and will face "a life of public...

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