"Buffoonery and Easy Sentiment": Popular Irish Plays in the Decade Prior to the Opening of the Abbey Theatre (review)

In recent years, scholars of performance in Ireland have demonstrated an increasing interest in exploring beyond the Abbey. Their studies have been prompted by a need to understand the relationship between theater and national consciousness in the years leading up to, and immediately following, Independence. Christopher Fitz-Simon's Buffoonery and Easy Sentiment": Popular Irish Plays in the Decade Prior to the Opening of the Abbey Theatre is a valuable contribution to that effort. Opening up an understanding of the theatrical world beyond the famous and esoteric work of Yeats, Synge, and Augusta Gregory, this trend in scholarly inquiry reveals the complex sources of nationalist ideology as well as less obvious modes of resistance within previously overlooked popular movements and works.

Other studies, like Mary Trotter's Ireland's National Theatres: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement (2001), present a more theorized analysis of the role of theater in Irish society during the period; what Fitz-Simon's volume offers readers is valuable insight into the work of less well-known playwrights who specialized in Irish melodrama, providing an overview of character types, plot structures, and critical responses that makes many writings of the time—much of it available only in manuscript—accessible to a broader contemporary audience. Placing its texts within the particular history of the theater business in Victorian England and Ireland, Buffoonery and Easy Sentiment explores the factors at play in determining authors' tactics for developing and framing their work for both public and censor. The volume also examines how the plays used a variety of theatrical strategies—visual, verbal and musical— to shape audience response. The book also includes data supplements that will prove helpful for scholars of the period.

Fitz-Simon's primary concern is melodrama. He sets out to redeem the genre for those who might discredit its contributions to political and social thought. Positing that the ubiquitousness of melodrama gave the genre the potential to be at least as influential, if not more so, than the later literary theater in generating Irish nationalist sentiment, Fitz-Simon presents the conceptual development of the form and places it within the history of technical change in the Victorian theater. After a brief analysis of the significant contribution of Dion Boucicault to the growth of Irish melodrama as a genre distinct from its English and American counterparts, he focuses on the work of several playwrights—including Edmund Falconer, Tyrone Power, and J. B. Fagan—with an extended discussion of Hubert O'Grady and the English transplant J. W. Whitbread. The volume also analyzes of a set of individual pieces that Fitz-Simon calls "Quasi-Irish" plays; that is, single works that fit the tradition, but that were written by British and American authors. In his observations about individual plays, Fitz-Simon highlights prominent trends—for instance, the difference between the witty colleen and her more bland English counterpart and the centrality of Irish, rather than English, villainy to the unfolding of plotlines. He also makes the point that, although both British and Irish audiences enjoyed Irish melodramas, they did so for very different reasons: the British were interested primarily in being entertained by colorful types, while the Irish were drawn to the success of Irish heroes and references to historical and cultural situations that the average English theatergoer would not recognize or credit as significant.

In extending the investigation of late nineteenth-century Irish nationalism beyond what would become the Irish National Theatre, Fitz-Simon is also concerned to extend the geographic scope of his inquiry. Dublin has been traditionally seen as the hub of theatrical activity, but Fitz-Simon includes both Belfast and Cork in his assessment of the response to melodrama. Adding these theatrical centers to the discussion allows Fitz-Simon to offer a more comprehensive picture of how...