Ondrej Pilny. Irony and Identity in Modern Irish Drama. Prague: LitterariaPragensia, 2006. pp. 186

Kurdi, Mária

English

Cadernos Espinosanos (E-Journal)

221Ondr ej Pilny. Irony and Identity in Modern Irish Drama. Prague: LitterariaPragensia, 2006. pp. 186.Mária KurdiThis intelligently, lucidly written volume offers analysesof some major writers and works in modern Irish drama from aparticular angle and the perspective of a scholar living in anothersmall European country, the Czech Republic, which ensures aunique position for the author. Pilny’s focus is the interaction between the representationsof collective and personal identity, a never-fading theme of drama in Ireland until ourtime, and the operations of the mode of irony, which is considered here in terms of itsRomantic concept “as a philosophical and aesthetic stance that serves to comment onthe apparent incongruities and paradoxes of the world” (3). Both identity and irony arecomplex enough territories to complicate the focus, challenging the author with theirsubtleties and transformations across time, geographical as well as socio-cultural spaces.Not many books undertake spanning over the three stages of the evolution of Irishdrama in the last one hundred and ten years, therefore doing so, which happens in thisvolume, is definitely to the credit of Pilny’s venture. Together with that, the book,however, purports to be neither a history of modern Irish theatre (in spite of its historicalreferences) nor a survey of the most outstanding playwrights; rather, it maps importantphases and influential directions in this narrative through selected examples.Structurally, the book is divided into three parts, the subtitles of which markout the above phases and directions with an eye for continuity, clarity as well as nuance.Under the heading “Visions” we find a chapter discussing Yeats’s and Synge’s ideasabout and practices of writing a new kind of drama for decolonising Ireland. “Rejections”as the second subtitle introduces the part on plays whose lack of acceptance was connectedwith what can be estimated as unwelcome changes in the history of Ireland’s nationaltheatre. Finally, the part called “Revisions” visits the contemporary scene centering onthe activities of Field Day and a couple of playwrights to interrogate recent dramaticdepictions of Irishness and, importantly, also of conventional notions about it. In thefollowing my aim is to highlight some of Pilny’s insights, contentious as they mayprove to be at times, to give the prospective reader a taste of the particular offerings andvalues of Irony and Identity in Modern Irish Drama.In the first part, Pilny is right to find the precarious relation between realismand the authentic portrayal of Irishness which the founders of the modern Irish theatreimplicitly promised, a crucial issue of the Revival period. Discussing Yeats, he points tothe paradox of the poet-playwright’s didactic purposes with the foundation of the modernIrish theatre while he tended to write plays decidedly unpopular because of their lack of222“mimetic accuracy” (23) in favour of poetic visions and an intricate symbolism. In therelatively long subchapter on Synge, Pilny underscores the multiplicity of ironies, oftendouble edged, in the plays, thoroughly complicating the issue of identity. By way of anexample, the blind couple in The Well of the Saints can be perceived, he says, as “mock-heroic, for the farcical and grotesque elements are ubiquitous in the play and prevent astraightforward reading of Mary and Martin as Romantic, unconforming selves” (57).The same nuanced approach could have been applied to the remarks on Nora in TheShadow of the Glen, whose departure for good with the “romanticized tramp” is describedas a “path for liberation” (49), although her acceptance of this situation seems to be justanother form of dependence on patriarchy, persuasively disguised by patronizing gestures.Closing the discussion of Synge, Pilny attributes “an ironic counterrevolutionary impulse”(66) to the writer, which sounds exaggerated or even politicized, therefore limiting inview of the complexities and visionary nature of Synge’s work.“Rejections,” the middle part of the book hinges on the analysis of SeanO’Casey’s The Silver Tassie and Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says “No”!, playswhich the Abbey Theatre, represented by Yeats and Lady Gregory, did not accept for itsprogramme in the 1920s. Admittedly, both were counterdiscursive and inclined todismantle “the prevailing narratives of nationhood” in the author’s opinion, by deployingirony and adopting a set of “pioneering avant-garde techniques” (71). Their downrightrejection, Pilny concludes the chapter, marked the end of the early, experimentalist eraof the Abbey and testified to its increasing conservativism, which endured for decades.This, however, simplifies the picture a bit, disregarding the greater variety of factorsthat had a role in changing theatre practices at that time. One also feels tempted toreconsider the actual dramaturgical merits of the two plays among the factors.In the part called “Revisions” Pilny’s arguments, again, have a more carefullyprovided grounding. Similarly to his interrogation of what became of the original aimsof the Abbey, here the author follows the route of the Field Day enterprise in relation toits initially declared attempt to go against hegemonic metanarratives of both identityand representation. As revisionary playwrights, Pilny looks at the work of Friel, Parkerand McDonagh, which is a strange combination at first sight. Nevertheless, the linkbetween them, found in their persistent use of irony, offers the reader further insights.Friel’s plays, Pilny opines, “do not allow for any metanarrative to arise. Ambiguitiesfrequently abound, while mythical and counter-mythical moments tend to stand in moreor less equal balance. … when it appears that a metanarrative may be emerging frombeyond the text, textual or dramatic irony eventually qualifies it” (119). Which, at thesame time, underscores that Friel’s art has surpassed the practices of the theatrical projecthe acted as one of the founders of. Next, the comments on Parker’s work, among others,suggest parallels between his woman-as-Ireland figure in Northern Star with that inJohnston’s The Old Lady Says “No”!, which would have deserved more elaborationperhaps at the expense of the not really productive consideration of another Parker play,Heavenly Bodies. Regarding McDonagh, Pilny’s addition to the already well established223view that the playwright’s work caricatures myths is notable: McDonagh, for him, is asatirist in a more subtle sense as well, because “his plays in fact ironise the very notionof Irish dramatic realism” (166). This appears to be a welcome claim for the writer to beconsidered as a postmodernist, although Pilnó’s book itself remains laudably frugalwith the assignment of labels and categories.All in all, Pilny manages to demonstrate how the metanarrative of the IrishDramatic Movement became deconstructed by its best representatives and later inheritorsthrough their ironical treatment of essentializing notions of identity and subversion ofnationalist or postnationalist audience expectations. What some readers may justifiablymiss here is not the good number of names and works left out or just barely mentioned,but the fact that the three main chapters are not followed by a summary or conclusion,which were to assess and interpret the author’s insights and observations on a moregeneral level. Nevertheless, Irony and Identity in Modern Irish Drama recommendsitself as a thoughtfully argued and, at certain points, benignly provocative contributionto the field, beneficial to study, to agree or disagree with. It claims a recognized place inthe scholarly library of those interested in fresh, comprehensive approaches to the proteanways of representation which make modern Irish drama so varied and challenging acrossmore than a century. While undoubtedly an individual achievement, Ondr ej Pilny’srecent book is also a hallmark of the development of Irish Studies at Charles University,Prague, which has become a known and respected centre of the field outside Ireland,demonstrated to the wider public by the expanding publication activities of LitterariaPragensia.

Ondrej Pilny. Irony and Identity in Modern Irish Drama

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Ondrej Pilny. Irony and Identity in Modern Irish Drama

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