Mirror up to Nurture: J. M. Synge and His Critics

Mirror up to Nurture: J. M. Synge and His Critics BEN LEVITAS "[TJhe frenzy that would have silenced his master-work," W. B. Yeats wrote in J. M. Synge and the Ireland ofhis Time, "was, like most violent things, artificial , that defence of virtue by those who have but little, which is the pomp and gallantry of journalism and its right to govern the world" (Essays 312). Thus polemicizing against the rhetoric of Synge's opponents, Yeats breathed new life into the arguments that - as he saw it - had by their "bitterness and ignorance" (Autobiographies 482) killed his friend and fellow dramatist. Yet also evident in the indictment is Yeats' commentary on his own flair for controversy , as the critics' critic, energetically condemning his era's easy condemnations : "[LJife became sweet again when I had learnt all I had not learnt in shaping words, in defending Synge against his enemies" (Essays 319). Had the sense of a lost passion not embittered Yeats himself, the sweet battle he enjoyed might not have seemed so solitary. The subject of his elegy was not quite the passive partner Yeats remembered. Picturing Synge as "a drifting silent man" to whom criticism made "no difference" (330, 329) forestalled any more searching study of the. ways in which Synge responded to; and developed out of, the debates his work provoked. This was perhaps because Yeats - persuasively - took as his focus the reception given The Playboy of the Western World. The week of the "Playboy riots" in January and February 1907 have gone down in the annals of Irish theatre history as the point at which the dialogue between artist and critic broke down - spectacularly, and in an epoch-making fashion. It is of course, following Yeats' lead, a week with a significance that goes beyond the tribulations and trials that accompanied that production. Cultural relations in pre-revolutionary Ireland have often been seen through the prism of the row; and to take the Playboy riots as symptomatic of deeper cultural divisions - as F. S. L. Lyons famously and influentially did - would seem to insist on the irreconcilable elements of Irish national culture. However, re-examination of the complex coalescences of Modern Drama, 47:4 (Winter 2004) 572 Mirror up to Nurture: J.M. Synge and His Critics 573 revival politics has latterly offered more room and less hatred to the equation. I At second glance, the debates that emerged in those early years of the national theatre can be construed in terms of collusion as much as collision. If battles were fought, they were often fought on common ground. Such scholarship, inevitably affecting as it does the writer-critic division as much as any political or religious divide, draws us inevitably back to question' again Yeats' ideal of an implausibly aloof Synge. And to test the apparent incommensurability of the genius-hack antimony. In theatre studies too, there has been a shift: responding to ongoing interrogations of the author-criticaudience distinctions,' recent studies of Irish theatre history have allowed more complex interplay between elements.3 Audiences are now ascribed a stronger role in both the event and its criticism, while the professional critic's voice speaks more insistently to counterpoint popular opinions. Similarly, acknowledgement of dramatists' rhetoric, enacted offstage as well as on, can emphasise points of contact between apparently discrete spheres of operation. Fittingly, the 2003 Conditions of Criticism Conference, being a public discussion of the critic's role in Ireland, brought its debate into the theatre space, more specifically the appropriately reborn Liberty Hall Centre for the Performing Arts.' Whatever the perils of placing theatre historians on stage, it is a development that responds to the necessarily complex interaction of performance and performance criticism. This article, responding to that event, stems from an observation: the Abbey Theatre sold out twice in that first, fierce outing of Synge's great play. There was, of course, the legendary opening night. But then there was the second fuJi house, not for the play itself, but for the critical debate held at the end of the famously fractious week5 There is a symmetry to these events that deserves greater scrutiny. The Playboy debate was a masterly displacement of...