Irish Popular Theatre

ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 Rabaté, or in the spectacle of Rabaté improvising routines with Joyce material, like a performer with a prop. One of the author's best performances in fact relies on the conceit that Joyce either knew or anticipated an ingeniously esoteric piece of Dante criticism published twenty-six years after his death. This is audacious, if you like, in its candid readiness to make Joyce say whatever suits Rabaté's purposes, but it is an audacity of the disagreeable sort that depends on the meekness of its audience, on our over-polite reluctance to tell the author that, actually, we came to hear about James Joyce rather than him because, frankly, James Joyce is more interesting. Or as Vicki Hearne has put it, more bluntly, about the work of other critics who insist on sharing or seizing their subject's spotlight on the grounds that what they're doing is literature too, "I'd like to see them put their money where their mouth is. The fact remains that their prose is execrable, and if it's literature it's bad literature." Rabaté strikes me as a highly intelligent man who has been over-indulged . Particularly when compared with the contributors and subjects of Dunleavy's book, he seems to have written too much and revised far too little, and has gotten away with it in large part because of primitive feelings of cultural inferiority aroused in many American and English breasts by a name like his. I wish he and his set would try to learn from productions like Janet Dunleavy's collection, and I wish the contributors to that collection would say more often about books like his what they obviously feel. Paris and America may yet achieve a fruitful encounter in the work of the Dublin author who has brought them together, but so far the meeting has produced more son than lumière. John Gordon ___________________ Connecticut College Irish Popular Theatre Stephen Watt. Joyce, O'Casey and the Irish Popular Theatre. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991. xvi + 227pp. $34.95 LIKE Cheryl Herr, whose work he acknowledges, Stephen Watt enjoys writing about popular culture, especially Irish theatre. It is an area that can still be carefully explored, even after Watt adds to Herr's findings. Perhaps in an effort to be deferential, Watt quotes often from more recent theories of literary criticism, especially Phenomenology, Marxism , Feminism, and Deconstruction. While the quotations are usually 400 BOOK REVIEWS appropriate, they also add more than a little jargon to Watt's otherwise readable text. Ignoring the music hall, Watt defines popular theatre largely in terms of melodramas, though some of these could also be thought of as historical plays. In his usage, "popular" means both commercially successful and catering to the public's taste, instead of trying to improve that taste. While these definitions rule out both the Irish Literary Theatre's and Abbey's offerings, the plays Watt cites do appear germane to the case he attempts to build. In brief, he finds at least two myths in the popular plays that he believes are reacted to by both Joyce and O'Casey. One is the myth of the hero, such as Robert Emmet, who sacrifices himself for the good of the nation and, therefore, inspires others to similar activity, and the other, an even more romantic and pastoral myth, peacefully reconciles the opposites Ireland has had to contend with. These myths dominate the plays of Seumas de Burea, J. W Whitbread, and Dion Boucicault, among others. The characters of Joyce and O'Casey often parrot the attitudes and myths from the melodramas, actions that function as parody for their authors. The Citizen in Ulysses is an obvious instance of the parodied nationalistic hero, but Watt could also mention the characters in "Ivy-Day in the Committee Room," though its atmosphere owes more to the music hall than the melodramas. Watt also notes that a play called Jem the Penman was performed during Joyce's schooldays, an obvious source for a motif in Finnegans Wake. Less definite is his ascription of Molly's intent to seduce Stephen (the older woman seducing the younger man...