Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (review)

{ 215 } BOOK REV IEWS tory. Contrariwise, historians are typically unable to inform their studies with a sound knowledge of theatrical production. Happily, Miller bridges that gap. His book can proudly take its place on the library shelf with the monumental and revered works of Walter Meserve and the careful scholarship of Arthur Hobson Quinn. That is heady company, but well earned. Persons interested in the history of the American theatre should own a copy of Entertaining the Nation . Libraries that have not already purchased this title should be ashamed of themselves. —LARRY D. CLARK University of Missouri \ Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle. By Paige Reynolds. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2007. v + 257 pp. $95.00 cloth. Deviating uniquely from the many Abbey-centric works of early-twentiethcentury Irish theatre scholarship, Paige Reynolds’s Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle casts a far wider net to challenge hegemonic readings of Irish audiences at the dawning of political independence. Reynolds’s overriding assertion—that the Irish audience’s agency in shaping artists, cultural trends, and the construction of national identity has been underestimated—is substantiated by five case studies: the 1924 Tailteann Games (a sporting and arts competition); Dublin Suffrage Week and its accompanying Irish premiere of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm in 1913; the public funeral for nationalist-martyr Terence MacSwiney in 1920; and two infamous theatre riots waged over J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World and Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in 1907 and 1926, respectively. Despite stumbling into some self-laid semantic traps, Reynolds offers compelling evidence that Irish citizens operated as creative forces, influencing the actions of those who commanded the cultural and political stages of early-twentieth-century Ireland. Before commencing with her case studies, Reynolds uses her first chapter to contest previous claims that Irish revivalism and international modernism were mutually exclusive movements. Although revivalists idealized ancient traditions , rural life, and authentic communities, while modernists emphasized the isolated artist, urban estrangement, and the disruption of social norms and aesthetic traditions, Reynolds attests that the ideas espoused by modern- { 216 } BOOK REV IEWS ists “permeated revivalist thinking” and vice versa, creating the subgenre of Irish modernism (13). The author employs ample primary source material to demonstrate that “Irish modernists altered their literary production and institutional practices in response to their audiences” (20) and is particularly adept at highlighting the shifting opinions of key Irish modernists through comparative analyses of letters, speeches, and press accounts spanning several decades. The book’s first and final case studies are devoted to the Abbey Theatre premieres of J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World and Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. According to the author, both playwrights incorporated onstage communities that represented Irish citizenry with varying degrees of sympathy and antipathy. Most importantly for Reynolds’s purposes, Synge’s Mayo villagers and O’Casey’s tenement dwellers prove too susceptible to sensationalism and sentiment and consequently fail to comprehend the gravity of the political spectacles they witness. The behaviors of these fictional groups exposed concrete deficiencies of the national audience to the national audience, ultimately leading to riotous reactions. Both chapters profit from Reynolds’s close textual readings of the plays, and her contention that Synge deliberately antagonized Irish audiences with Playboy leads to an interesting discussion of popular theatre and the Catholic Church as “two dominant institutions that gathered and influenced Irish collectives” (57). While her theories provide fresh justifications for the riots, these two case studies tread on familiar scholarly territory . Her investigations into Dublin Suffrage Week, Terence MacSwiney’s political death and funeral, and the Tailteann Games, however, are far more pioneering ; within these three chapters Reynolds’s book is at its most fascinating and paradoxical. Dublin Suffrage Week, held in 1913, was designed to inspire sympathy for the suffragist cause in those attending the week’s activities. Striving to combat gendered stereotypes that pitted the hysterical and overly emotional Irish woman against the logical and heroic Irish man, suffragists proved their worthiness to vote by relinquishing impassioned sentiment in favor of calm rationality. The dramatic centerpiece of Dublin Suffrage Week, however, was...