Ibsen and the Irish Revival (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ibsen and the Irish Revival Patrick Burke Irina Ruppo Malone, Ibsen and the Irish Revival. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. xi+223 pp. In some ways, as its title suggests, the thrust of Dr Irina Ruppo Malone’s study runs counter to the integrative approaches to the Irish Literary Revival, currently deemed to be more critically useful, key elements of which have been intelligently examined in “New Perspectives on the Irish Literary Revival,” a special issue of Irish University Review (33/1, 2003). In his Field Day monograph, Revival (Cork University Press, 2003), P. J. Mathews, a contributor to “New Perpectives” and arguably the leading advocate of the integrative approach, names the defining elements of the Revival as the Abbey Theatre, Sinn Fein, the Gaelic League, and the Co-operative Movement. Dr. Ruppo Malone proceeds by a different road: in her conclusion she defines the scholarly ambition of her book: to “use Ibsen and Ireland to examine the patterns of interrelation between literary influence and dramatic reception” (177). To fulfill this aim, discussion of “the international dimension of the Irish Literary Revival, a movement often misconstrued as a narrowly nationalist phenomenon” (176), is a critical essential. The standard accounts of drama in the Revival (Malone, Ellis-Fermor, Robinson, and, more recently, Murray, Grene, Levitas, and Morash) agree in addressing as of central significance the high ambition of Yeats, Lady Gregory, [End Page 365] and others in the 1890s to bring into being a Celtic and Irish theater, which for Yeats would be essentially poetic, having nothing of the “objective” or the journalistic about it; the theatrical know-how of the amateur Fay brothers, without which the Abbey Theatre would never have developed; the solitary and unique genius of Synge; the final triumph within the Abbey of such realists as William Boyle, Padraic Colum, T. C. Murray, and Lennox Robinson. Informative parallel assessments of the Abbey’s rival theaters (the Theatre of Ireland, the Gate) have been provided by William Feeney and Christopher Fitz-Simon, respectively. In Ibsen and the Irish Revival, Ruppo Malone, whose research is exemplary in its breadth and thoroughness, deftly exposes some of the half-truths and skewed emphases to be found in the standard accounts, notably the false assumption that Yeats could not be other than hostile to Ibsen, as if the kind of theater to which the Abbey aspired would of poetic necessity be hostile to Ibsen’s prose. As early as 1894, in his highly positive review of a new translation of Brand, Yeats commends Ibsen warmly, albeit hinting at his own preference for the Norwegian as a poet rather than a realistic dramatist. In 1897, and again in 1901, he was still describing him as “the one great master the modern stage has produced” (Ruppo Malone 40). By 1904, however, the foundation year of the Abbey Theatre, the art of Ibsen had become “terrible, satirical, inhuman,” even if such assessments are based almost exclusively on Ibsen’s 1880s plays of social concern — The Pillars of Society, A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People. What had happened in the intervening three years? Tot homines, quot sententiae. As Ruppo Malone invitingly observes, “the question of Ibsen’s influence on Yeats . . . remains under-researched” (6). The title of her work, quite deliberately, in my opinion, invites, by means of that innocent “and,” a charge of lack of focus — Ibsen as an influence on the Revival? The Revival as an influence on Ibsen? Ibsen’s impact on contemporary Irish dramatists? Neither Ruppo Malone nor any other critic is in a position to supply what might have been anticipated in a study such as this — levels of popular or scholarly interest in the rehearsal processes or live performances of Ibsen plays in Ireland: for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, very few of the plays had been actually performed. It was 1923 before the Abbey presented its own A Doll’s House, the delay possibly affected by the lukewarm reception given the Ben Iden Payne production of 1911, the absence of political debate on that occasion, and even the suggestion, in the era of the suffragists and suffragettes, that, as the...