Chapter 2 - The Spectacle of Modernity

Summary

Chapter 2 looks into the ethical and political issues attached to the performance of ethnicity. It relates Synge’s engagement with Ireland’s national theatre project to the larger historical and cultural context in which performances of ethnicity were given: international exhibitions, for instance. This is all the more relevant as Ireland itself was still at the time the objects of such performances. The chapter starts by considering the 1907 Dublin International Exhibition at Herbert Park as a public display of Ireland’s modernity. It then ties Synge’s adaptation to the modern stage of a ritual performance practice such as keening to his interest in the ethnographic sideshow of the Somali Village that he witnessed as he visited the Dublin International Exhibition. The chapter reads Synge’s fascination for the war-song of the Somali performers, which in a letter to Maire O’Neill he compares to 'some of the keens on Aran', as evidence of his preoccupation with the capacity of ritual performance to undermine the potentially subjugating structures within which such performance is sometimes framed, whether those structures be the stage of a national theatre or the performance space of a native village in an international exhibition.