Hey there! I’m Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater,
and today we’ll be discussing Irish drama.
[Mike to Yorick] Nope. Not for it.
There will be no leprechaun jokes, no lucky charms, no faith and begorrah,
because the culture that produced the most
linguistically expressive and inventive canon of modern drama
does not deserve dumb jokes.
It deserves smart ones! We’re gonna try.
Yorick is probably gonna come back later with a shillelagh.
We’re going to look at the founding of the Abbey Theater and the work of J.M. Synge,
the first legit literary star that the Abbey produced.
Then, we're gonna head to England,
where a couple expats shook up bourgeois drama with some very funny plays.
Let’s crack on.
OK. Sorry. That’s the last one.
[INTRO MUSIC]
In the late 19th-century, Ireland experienced an Irish Renaissance.
It was different from the English Renaissance,
in that it was Irish, came later, had less plague, and was an explicit reaction against England,
which had colonized Ireland since the 16th century.
The Irish Renaissance was largely a literary one,
celebrating Irish history, folklore, and the Gaelic language.
Eventually, a couple of its adherents—
the poets W. B. Yeats and Edward Martyn, and the writer and folklorist Lady Augusta Gregory
—thought that it was time “to bring upon the stage the deeper
thoughts and emotions of Ireland.”
They founded the Irish Literary Theater,
which eventually merged with another theater to form the Irish National Theater Society,
first performing in Molesworth Hall.
In 1904, they took over a mechanic’s home on Lower Abbey Street
and acquired an actual, physical stage: the Abbey Theater.
Its opening performance was a short symbolist play by W.B. Yeats, “On Baile’s Strand,”
...along with Lady Gregory’s “Spreading the News,”
a gentle comedy about how a piece of gossip travels through a community.
This theater is still going, by the way!
Albeit in a different location.
Yeats was a great poet.
Lady Gregory was a fine folklorist and a champion of Irish literature and culture.
She basically invented the Irish folk drama.
But neither of them was a great playwright.
The Abbey’s first great playwright,
whose play “The Shadow of the Glen” debuted on the theater’s second night,
was John Millington Synge.
Synge was born into an upper-middle-class Protestant family.
After college and music school, he moved to Paris to study literature and met Yeats.
Yeats was like, "Leave.
If you really want to be a writer, you should go to the remote Aran Islands,
which are really great if you like whiskey and knitwear and drowning.
And there," Yeats told him, "You should express a life that has never found expression.”
Synge was like, "CHALLENGE ACCEPTED PAL."
For several summers,
he studied the people and customs of the Aran Islands,
and especially the language, a dialect that’s rich, musical, and eloquent.
This language really cracked open his writing.
As he wrote in a preface to his later play, “The Playboy of the Western World,”
“In a good play, every speech should be as fully-flavored as a nut or apple,
and such speeches cannot be written by anyone who
works among people who have shut their lips on poetry.
In Ireland, for a few years more,
we have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender;
so that those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers
in places where the springtime of the local life has been forgotten.”
Between 1902 and 1909, Synge wrote six plays, five of them set in contemporary Ireland.
Like Chekhov, he died young, at the age of 38.
At first glance, his plays seem romantic,
concerned with forbidding landscapes and the noble rural people who inhabit them.
But Synge was no romantic.
He was an unsentimental realist whose work was tinged with myth,
because the rural people that he encountered lived with myth in their daily lives.
His work is naturalistic, too, but like the later plays of Ibsen and Chekhov,
it pushes toward the symbolic, mixing comedy, tragedy,
and satire...
forming a heightened realism that borders on magical.
Synge was controversial in his day—not so much
among the elites of the Irish Renaissance as with audiences,
who decided that his dramas were an insult to Irish nationalism and especially Irish womanhood.
When the Abbey staged Synge’s “Playboy of the Western World,”
about a man who claims to have killed his father,
crowds tried to shout down the play every night and the police were called.
The crowd was especially upset by the use
of the word “shift,” meaning a woman’s slip or undergarment.
Which either means that underwear is really scandalous,
or that audiences had already come prepared
to hate a play that didn’t square with their ideas of Irish nobility.
Or both.
Let’s take a look at one of Synge’s less controversial plays,
and one of the greatest one-acts ever written: “Riders to the Sea,”
which was first performed in 1904 and revived at the Abbey in 1906.
Help us out, Thought Bubble:
In a fisherman’s cottage on the Aran islands,
Cathleen is baking bread when her sister Nora comes in with
a bunch of clothes pulled off a drowned man.
Is the drowned man their brother Michael? The clothes will tell.
The sisters have already lost four brothers and their father to drowning so this would be… bad.
Their mother, Maurya, comes in,
worrying about her youngest son Bartley’s plans to sail to a horse fair in Connemara.
Bartley enters and asks for his mother’s blessing, but she won’t give it.
“If it was a hundred horses, or a thousand horses you had itself,
what is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?” she tells him.
Bartley leaves anyway, riding a red mare and leading a grey pony,
and his sisters tell their mother to go after him – give him her blessing and a bit of bread.
She does, and while she’s gone, the sisters discover that the clothes are Michael’s.
Maurya returns and says that she couldn’t catch Bartley because she had a terrible vision.
She saw Bartley riding the red mare, and riding along beside him was dead Michael.
Soon after, some villagers bring in Bartley’s body.
The grey pony knocked him into the sea…where he
DROWNED because this family cannot catch a damned break.
Maurya has no more sons, but she accepts her fate, saying,
“They're all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me…
I'll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south,
and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west,
making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other…
I won’t care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening.”
Thanks, Thought Bubble. That was… fatalistic.
You can see Synge’s attention to realistic detail with the bread cooking in the cottage stove,
and you can hear it in the dialect.
He was so concerned that the setting be realistic
that he imported Aran fabrics and tried to make sure the set gave off the correct smells.
But there’s more than realism here, too.
The play has links to Greek tragedy and also to Celtic mythology,
especially to a malevolent spirit called the puca who often appeared as a horse.
For Synge, the natural and the supernatural were linked among the rural Irish.
As Yeats wrote after Synge’s death...
“He loves all that has edge, all that is salt in the mouth,
all that is rough to the hand, all that heightens the emotions by contest,
all that stings into life the sense of tragedy.”
But Irish writers weren’t only reinventing theater in Ireland,
they were reimagining theater in England, too.
Because English theater came to modernism a lot more slowly.
Melodramas gave way to hand-wringing social problem plays
that ultimately reinforced the bourgeois order
and really weren’t that different from domestic melodramas.
I mean, if you’re going to promote a conservative moral order,
at least have everyone die in an avalanche.
But along came two Irishmen to rehabilitate English drama.
And they did it with wit.
And to whit: Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. AKA … OSCAR WILDE.
When he was at university, he told a friend,
“I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist.
Somehow or other I’ll be famous and if not famous, notorious.”
And he was right. Totally right.
After writing the tragedy “Vera,” and then the censored symbolist drama, “Salomé,”
Wilde had his first theatrical hit, “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” in 1892.
About a seemingly unfaithful husband, it looks like a social problem play:
it seems to resolve conventionally the way that social comedies and problem plays are supposed to.
Nice and comfortable; bourgeoisie people out of trouble.
But Wilde spends most of the play making fun of society
and undercutting the whole idea of conventional morals.
The play demonstrates his belief that, quote:
“We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously,
and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.”
His most brilliant and subversive work is the 1895 play, “The Importance of Being Earnest,”
one of the great stage comedies.
It’s a sparkling whirl of disguise, coincidence and mistaken identity,
and there’s a bit about muffins that you might say I am … particularly fond of.
But amidst all the snackfood jokery, Earnest is also earnestly undermining
comfortable, conventional beliefs about love, marriage, family, and hard work.
It argues that the truth—the thing that’s usually
at the core of any problem play—is actually overrated and unstable.
The same year that “Earnest” premiered,
Wilde was put on trial for “gross indecency,” which at the time was a euphemism… for being gay.
He served two years hard labor, and died penniless a few years later of meningitis.
In “De Profundis,” his final work, he wrote,
“I took the drama, the most objective form known to art,
and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet.”
And George Bernard Shaw did that, too.
A brilliant critic and political philosopher,
his plays are both brainy comedies and articulations
of his particular and sometimes weird beliefs
about men, women, evolution, and civil society.
Shaw was a huge fan of Ibsen, paying tribute to him in “The Quintessence of Ibsenism.”
Like Ibsen, he believed that the theater could help audiences see
through the fictions of conventional morality and into life as it really is.
He used humor as a social critique in plays that are spikier and more pointed than Wilde’s.
His works—“Pygmalion,” “Man and Superman,” “Major Barbara,”
and “Mrs. Warren’s Profession”—include debates and dialectics, a dance of ideas.
Some of these ideas are provocative, contrarian, and even dangerous.
What drama can do, he wrote,
“is to take this unmeaning, haphazard show of life, that means nothing to you,
and arrange it in such a way as to make you think
very much more deeply about it than you ever dreamed....
That is drama, and that is a very important public service to render.”
In 1925, Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He donated it to a fund for better translations of Strindberg.
Classy.
Thanks for watching.
Next time, we’re gonna take a look at symbolism, surrealism,
and also dadaism, the theatrical form that makes literally no sense ON PURPOSE!
But, until then: flapjack, carburetor, culottes.
I mean…curtain.
Crash Course Theater is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios.
Head over to their channel to check out some of their shows like Origin of Everything.
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