David Edgar’s plays include The Prisoner’s Dilemma, Playing with Fire and, most recently, Testing the Echo. He is working on a book about playwriting.
MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR
RELATED ARTICLES
2 December 2004
Bram Stoker and Irish Protestant Gothic
20 March 1997
What he did
12 October 1989
Gaelic Communist
1 December 1983
Rembrandt and Synge and Molly
21 September 2006
Shaw’s Surprises
2 March 1989
Renaissance
17 July 1980
New Women
RELATED CATEGORIES
Biography and memoirs, Biography, Literature and literary criticism, Drama, 1800-1899, 1880-1899, 1900-1999, 1900-1945, 1900-1909, Europe, Western Europe, Ireland, Literature and literary criticism, Critical theory
Vol. 23 No. 6 · 22 March 2001
pages 34-35 | 3472 words
What’s Coming
David Edgar
- Fool of the Family: A Life of J.M. Synge by W.J. McCormack
Weidenfeld, 499 pp, £25.00, March 2000, ISBN 0 297 64612 5
- Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School 1991-2000 edited by Nicholas Grene
Lilliput, 220 pp, £29.95, July 2000, ISBN 1 901866 47 5
There’s a saying that all great English playwrights start out as failed Irish actors. In fact, only the late Restoration dramatist George Farquhar fits the bill completely. But actor-playwrights go back from Marber, Pinter, Osborne and Coward to Jonson and Shakespeare. And if you leave out the Irish (by birth or upbringing), you lose Congreve, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Wilde and Shaw. The source that gave London The Importance of Being Earnest and Arms and the Man a hundred years ago shows no signs of drying up: Irish writers, whether resident in England or Ireland, remain a considerable presence on the London stage.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 23 No. 8 · 19 April 2001
From Mary King
David Edgar and I have both been reading W.J. McCormack's biography of John Millington Synge, Fool of the Family (LRB, 22 March), but have we been reading the same text? On the matter of Yeats's much trumpeted admonition to Synge to visit the Aran Islands, contrary to Edgar's assertion, the biography makes no reference to Yeats's advice on page 28. Page 140 deals with Synge's diary entry for 21 December 1896, which records his meeting with Yeats, but makes no mention of having received any earth-shaking admonition to go west. Page 186 does not attribute 'momentous consequences' to Yeats's putative advice, but to the meeting between the two writers. On page 194, McCormack places the proposal and its timing where it belongs: in the realm of unverified and by now unverifiable speculation. To redirect Edgar's misdirected criticism, the whole point of McCormack's argument is that, as Edgar says, this so-called 'vital event has been anticipated and recollected without ever having been described' with any degree of historical accuracy, least of all by Yeats.
Edgar claims that Synge should be compared with Chekhov and not, as McCormack does, with Ibsen, although Synge had no recorded or verifiable acquaintance with Chekhov's work, and each of his plays can be seen as being preoccupied, like Ibsen's Ghosts, with the impact on the present and future of the past. When the Moon Has Set, as McCormack contends, takes the transgenerational guilt of Ghosts and nervously, with telling excess of explanation, seeks to explain away the particular nightmare that was history for him and his class.
Fool of the Family is a carefully researched antidote to the noxious and still prevalent virus of peasant protégé Syngeitis, initially incubated by Yeats. One of the greatest merits of McCormack's biography is precisely what Edgar censures: its insistence on what cannot be known, on what is difficult to date, on what conclusions cannot (and should not) be drawn and, thanks partly to Yeats's propensity for mythmaking and partly to family meddling, on what cannot now be challenged.
Mary King
Ballyduff, Co. Wicklow
