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Which Fiddler Calls the Tune? The Playboy Riots and the Politics of Nationalist Theatre Spectatorship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

Mary Trotter
Mary Trotter
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of English at Texas Tech University. She has published several essays on the theatre of the Irish literary renaissance and on contemporary Irish theatre.
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Extract

In October of 1903, The United Irishman, a leading newspaper of the Irish nationalist movement, published an essay by William Butler Yeats entitled “The Irish National Theatre and Three Sorts of Ignorance.” Yeats wrote this essay after an infuriated nationalist community protested the Irish National Theatre Society's production of John Millington Synge's play, In the Shadow of the Glen. In response to Yeats's admonishment of the nationalist movement for putting politics over aesthetics in their creation and judgment of Irish drama, Arthur Griffith, the editor of the newspaper, added some remarks of his own:

Mr. Yeats does not give any reason why if the Irish National Theatre has no propaganda save that of good art it should continue to call itself either Irish or National. If the Theatre be solely an Art Theatre, then its plays can be fairly criticized from the standpoint of art. But whilst it calls itself Irish National its productions must be considered and criticised as Irish National productions.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , November 1998 , pp. 39 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1998

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References

ENDNOTES

1. In that essay, Yeats spoke against l) an insistence on a country Gaelic dialect, which usually appeared as a tacky form of English 2) the “‘obscurantism’ of the more ignorant sort of priest” that demanded only very simple themes; and 3) the “obscurantism of the politicians who want art to serve immediately the needs of a particular cause.” The essay can be found in Yeats's Uncollected Prose, ed. J.P. Frayne and C. Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976) 2:307.

2. Griffith, Arthur, The United Irishman (25 October 1903), 2–3.Google Scholar

3. Works which have complicated the binary model of Irish political and cultural resistance at the beginning of the century include Margaret Ward's recovery of Irish women's involvement in the nationalist movement in Unmanageable Revolutionaries, Women and Irish Nationalism (London: Pluto Press, 1983); Goldring's, Maurice analysis of the role of the Anglo-Irish intellectual in Pleasant the Scholar's Life: Irish Intellectuals and the Construction ofthe Nation-State (London: Serif, 1993)Google Scholar; and Steven Wilmer's various discussions of nationalist activism within the context of the labor movement and the role of women in Irish drama.

4. For a detailed analysis of melodrama's cultural work in tum-of-the-century Dublin, see Herr, Cheryl, For the Land They Loved: Irish Political Melodrama, 1890–1925 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991).Google Scholar Herr's book includes several popular melodrama texts from the Queen's Royal stage. Burca's, Seamas deThe Queen ‘s Royal Theatre, Dublin, 1829–1969 (Dublin: S. de Burca, 1983)Google Scholar, includes detailed illustrations of posters and other items from the Queen's as well as recollections by workers in that theatre.

5. Herr, 15.

6. Cairns, David and Richards, Shaun provide an excellent overview of the nationalist amateur dramatic movement in their essay, “Reading a Riot: The ‘Reading Formation’ of Synge's Abbey Audience,” Literature and History 13, 2 (1987): 219–237.Google Scholar This paper is indebted in many ways to Cairns and Richards’ excellent critique of how outrage over The Playboy of the Western World differed in several camps. But that article looks more at the reasons for different groups’ dissent, while this article attempts to construct how that dissent was performed and the effects ofthat dissent on the idea of Irish national theatre generally.

7. United Ireland, 15 November 1902, 3.

8. For analysis of the use of tableaux by nationalist women, see Tymoczko, Maria, ed. “Tableaux Vivants in Ireland at the Turn of the Century.” Nineteenth Century Theatre, 23, 1 and 2 (Summer and Winter 1995): 90–110.Google Scholar Also see Trotter, Mary, “Women's Work: Inghinidhe na hEireann and the Irish Dramatic Movement,” Crucibles of Crisis: Performing Social Change, Reinelt, Janelle, ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 37–56.Google Scholar

9. “Inghinidhe na h'Eireann: Gaelic Tableaux Vivants,” Freeman's Journal, 10 April 1901, 5; Inghinidhe na hEireann First Annual Report, 8.

10. “Inghinidhe na hEireann: The Gaelic Tableaux,” Newspapers: United Irishman, 13 April 1901, 5.

11. Schechner, Richard, Performance Theory (Rev. ed. New York: Routledge, 1988), 190.Google Scholar

12. Yeats, W.B., Cathleen ni Houlihan, in The Collected Flays of William Butler Yeats (London: MacMillan, 1953), 57.Google Scholar In the first production, the name was spelled “Kathleen,” which I have preferred here. Yeats later changed the spelling.

13. Gonne managed to evoke the proactive elements of Kathleen as a powerful figure in the “social drama” of her own nationalist activism. However, the ultimately passive stereotype of Kathleen as an inspirer of, but not participant in, revolution, helped limit the kinds of roles women have been allowed to play in Irish nationalist activity throughout this century.

14. Karen Gaylord describes how “the theatrical occasion involves a double-consciousness for all concerned. The performance takes place on at least two levels of ‘reality’ simultaneously and within at least two frames. The outer frame always embraces both audience and performers. The inner frame demarcates the playing space,” Gaylord, , “Theatrical Performances: Structure and Process, Tradition and Revolt,” in Performers and Performances: The Social Organization of Artistic Work, ed. Kamerman, Jack B. and Martorella, Rosanne (New York: Praeger, 1983), 136Google Scholar, cited in Bennett, Susan, ed.: Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, (New York: Routledge, 1990), 148–49.Google Scholar The lines between these frames were clearly blurred under the conditions of the nationalist amateur production, as both actors and audiences “performed” their ideology in self-conscious ways. A “high art” example of this blurring was apparent a few years later in the performances of Yeats's At the Hawk's Well in Lady Cunard's drawing room. See Worthen, W.B., “The Discipline of the Theatrical Sense: At the Hawk's Well and the Rhetoric of the Stage,” Modern Drama 30 (1987): 90–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. The economic struggles for dominance over the Abbey Theatre are wonderfully recounted in Frazier's, Adrian history, Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).Google Scholar

16. Sinn Fein, 10 March 1906, 1.

17. Irish Daily Independent, 28 December 1904, (italics mine).

18. See Frazier, 108–8.

19. Colum, Mary, Life and the Dream (Dublin: Dolmen, 1966), 116.Google Scholar

20. Chaudhuri, Una, Staging Place (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 9.Google Scholar

21. Ina 1902 edition of Samhain, Yeats declared that, “I had once asked a dramatic company to let me rehearse them in barrels that they might forget gesture and have their minds free to think of speech for awhile. The barrels, I thought, might be on castors, so that I could shove them about with a pole when the action required it.” Yeats, W.B., Plays and Controversies (London: Macmillan, 1923), 21.Google Scholar

22. Actor and acting instructor Frank J. Fay was a Dublin theatre critic before joining his brother, William G. Fay, in helping to develop the acting style which became synonymous with the Abbey theatre. Both the Fay brothers worked with nationalist theatre groups like the Daughters of Erin and the Celtic Literary Society, and were founding members of the Irish National Dramatic Company. While Willie was the leading director and Frank a leading actor of the INTS in its first decade, conflicts within the company caused both men ultimately to move on. Frank Fay's theatre criticism is collected in To wards a National Theatre: The Dramatic Criticism of Frank J. Fay, ed. Hogan, Robert (Dublin: Dolmen, 1970).Google Scholar

23. Sinn Fein (15 December 1906), 3.

24. Synge, , The Playboy of the Western World, in The Playboy of the Western World unA Riders to the Sea (London: Unwin, 1986), 73.Google Scholar

25. Quoted in Hogan, Robert, Bumham, Richard, and Poteet, Daniel P., The Abbey Theatre: The Years of Synge, 1905–1909 (Dublin: Dolmen, 1978), 130.Google Scholar Lady Gregory's comment echoes Yeats's pronouncement in the September 1903 edition of Samhain, the journal of the Irish National Theatre Society: “…we will give you nothing that does not please ourselves, and if you do not like it, and we are still confident that it is good, we will set it before you again, and trust to changing taste…All true arts…are a festival where it is the fiddler who calls the tune” (3).

26. Ms. 13,068 (21) National Library of Ireland, in The Abbey Theatre: the Years of Synge 1905–1909, ed. Hogan, Robert and Kilroy, James (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1978), 144.Google Scholar

27. See Hogan, Bumham, and Poteet, 144.

28. Quoted in Hogan, Bumham, and Poteet, 149.

29. Strand, Ginger, “The Playboy, Critics and the Enduring Problem of the Audience,” in Assessing the Achievement of J.M. Synge, ed. Gonzales, Alexander (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), 10–23.Google Scholar