Introduction

Summary

This study is interested in the transformative potentialities of theatrical performance. It is conjointly preoccupied with the various ways in which the plays of J. M. Synge (1871–1909) problematize performance and, in so doing, possess the potential to unsettle narratives of progress and modernity. Performance is a slippery notion, embracing a large spectrum of social and cultural activities. Famously defined by Richard Schechner as ‘twice-behaved’ or ‘restored’ behaviour,¹ performance, in the theatrical sense of the term, explores a repertoire of existing embodied practices which it repeats, combines anew and even re-invents in the present. From that perpetual movement of re-composition and re-creation alternative ways of being and thinking can and do emerge. The theatre stage is a privileged site where these fluctuating alternatives can be elaborated, tested and played with. If theatre is inherently an art of repetition, its repetitions are indeed by essence singular and differential, insofar as the gap between one performance iteration and the next testifies to the individual and collective choices which have been made by actors and stage directors.