Scholars put Synge plays on the map

THE scholars had come to the Wicklow village to hear about a 19th century Irish playwright. At the Synge Summer School in Rathdrum yesterday morning, Prof Nicholas Grene said that the playwright's work drew people from Australia or Japan, Sweden or Italy, and drew them not just to Ireland, but to Wicklow.

About five miles down the road, another kind of fan came streaming into a different valley to pay homage to a different kind of writing. In their shorts and anoraks, American and British television tourists sat outside the yellow fronted pub in a village known to 14 million viewers as Ballykissangel and to its inhabitants as Avoca. The local car parks overflowed with English registered cars and coaches as their occupants wandered from the pub to the busiest church in Ireland on a Monday afternoon.

Prof Grene, head of the Department of English at TCD, had one question in his paper, entitled Place and Perspective in Synge: how far were the plays written for people who know the places in which they were set? Not much, he concluded.

Rathdrum was an important location for the summer school because Synge had set three of his plays in the area, he said.

It was all a matter of place and perspective when it came to assessing Synge's credentials as a national dramatist, Prof Grene said. There were the "critics who saw him as a cosmopolitan writer, someone with an alien, outsider's view of the lives of the people".

Synge wrote about listening through a chink in the floor of an old Wicklow house to "hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen". His critics shouted fraud.

Prof Grene told his audience how Synge sometimes named locations faithfully. "Yet they don't have to be real. Two of the most frequently mentioned in the plays are fabricated. Rathvanna, referred to repeatedly in three plays, does not exist on any Wicklow map and never did."

The real, the local and the imagined rub shoulders in Synge's plays, Prof Grene said.

Yesterday afternoon the scholars took a Synge tour of his villages and townlands. It did not include Avoca, where the post office is called Ballykissangel. Judging from Prof Grene's paper, that was a bit of artistic licence which Synge might have enjoyed.

"He needed an imagination of place and setting, and quite a precise one, as the starting point for his drama. But he did not have to make it correspond in detail to an actual location.