Das österreichische und irische ländliche Volksstück des 20. Jahrhunderts als Ausdruck nationaler Selbstdarstellung auf der Bühne: Ein Vergleich by Regina Standún (review)

In the summer of 1999, Regina Standún experienced one of those juxtapositions that sometimes inspire years of scholarship. Attending a drama festival in Austria, Standún noticed that one of the plays to be performed was Felix Mitterer’s German adaption of J. M. Synge’s Irish classic, The Playboy of the Western World. What in the world, Standún wondered, had Ireland to do with Austria? Standún’s answer was that what Ireland and Austria have in common is the Volksstück. In Das österreichische und irische ländliche Volksstück des 20. Jahrhunderts als Ausdruck nationaler Selbstdarstellung auf der Bühne: Ein Vergleich, Standún meticulously compares and contrasts the Austrian and Irish Volksstück; as she explains, her interest is in the “Genreentwicklung im soziohistorischen Kontext, insbesondere im Nationalliteraturkontext” (10). In this exhaustively researched contribution to comparative literature, Standún demonstrates that the hoary old peasant play is capable of some new tricks.

Standún divides her work into six large sections. The first two carefully define the Volksstück. While the Volksstück’s roots can be traced back to the Middle Ages, the Volksstück, or “peasant play,” enjoyed its greatest successes in, ironically, the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries. The genre’s success was ironic because the plays began to enter the Austrian, and later the Irish, stages precisely at the time when real peasants were exiting the historical stage. Peasant plays were typically comic and nostalgic. To be sure, sometimes they included a little bite. Often they asserted Austrian and Irish national identities in opposition to those nations’ powerful neighbors, Germany and Britain, respectively. While the plays poked fun at the country bumpkins and their odd clothes and funny speech, they also occasionally allowed the country bumpkins to outwit the arrogant city slickers.

Standún is interested, though, not simply in the history and variety of the peasant play/Volksstück as in its surprising revival in the twentieth century. To get at the twentieth-century versions of the old genre, Standún carefully compares three pairs of plays. Her discoveries are surprising and provocative. Standún first compares J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907) to Karl Schönherr’s Erde (1908). Both Synge and Schönherr surprised audiences by resurrecting what seemed to be an exhausted genre; Standún compares the plays in great detail and considers not only plot, characters, and themes but also costuming, dialects, and reception. The two plays would have entirely different careers. Synge’s play provoked ferocious opposition at first but quickly became a major part of the Irish theatrical repertoire, suggesting that the Irish long retained an interest in rural-themed peasant plays. Schönherr’s play, to the contrary, aged quickly and disappeared from Austrian stages.

Standún next compares Richard Billinger’s Rosse (1931) to T. C. Murray’s Michaelmas Eve (1932). Both plays demonstrated the continuing vitality of the Volksstück in clerical-conservative Ireland and Austria. Neither play aged particularly well though; Billinger’s Rosse in particular demonstrated the dangerous ways the peasant play could intersect with politics. Rosse’s rural themes could, on the one hand, appear to be an evocation of an “Austrian” rather than a “German” rural world; at the same time, the play’s focus on peasant life paralleled some of the themes of the Nazis’ “völkisch” ideology. No wonder, then, that after 1945, few Austrians expressed much interest either in Rosse or in the Volksstück in general. Meanwhile, by the 1950s, Ireland was slowly awakening from a generation-long clerical and rural conservatism. One might well have assumed, then, that in both Austria and Ireland, the peasant play genre had run its course.

Yet, as Standún demonstrates in her third...