John Millington Synge (1871–1909) is the fulcrum upon which Irish drama and theatre studies is balanced. Synge's nodal position is predicated upon the dramatist's rock ‘n’ roll recalcitrance towards the dramaturgical praxis of his contemporaries; his subject matter was as shocking as the Anglo-Irish idiom in which it was articulated. After Synge's premature death in 1909, W. B. Yeats's fundamental concern was that Synge scholars would attempt ‘to mould . . . some simple image of the man’.Footnote ¹ However, W. J. McCormack's concentric biography of Synge, The Fool of the Family: A Life of J. M. Synge,Footnote ² and Ann Saddlemyer's The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge,Footnote ³ have demonstrated that Synge's life was complex, multifaceted and in deep dialogue with Irish culture. But with respect to Synge's drama a simple image has surrounded critical discourse: the politics of Irish nationalism.

In Synge's playlet National Drama: A Farce, the dramatist debunked Irish theatre's impetus to ‘hold up a mirror to the Irish Nation’, maintaining that ‘an Irish drama that is written in Ireland about Irish people, and not on a foreign model will and must be national in so far as it exists at all’.Footnote ⁴ But what keeps scholars coming back to a negotiation of Irish nationalism in Synge's plays is his curious relationship with Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Synge held a familial allegiance with the class formation known as the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, which had a traditional monopoly on all forms of Irish capital (economic, social, symbolic). Accordingly, Synge's drama has been considered as an articulation of Anglo-Irish nationalism as advocated by Daniel Corkery, who, in Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature,Footnote ⁵ propagated Irish nationalism apropos of Synge's plays to the extent that they have become irretrievably concomitant with the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy's battle for political hegemony. Nicholas Grene's Synge: A Critical Study of the Plays did much to reconcile this reductive logic by pointing out that Synge simply did not care for national identity politics, least of all Anglo-Irish national identity politics.Footnote ⁶ Therefore the postulation that Synge's drama is indexical of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy's battle for hegemony is speculative because, as Grene points out, with respect to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, Synge saw ‘nothing but repressiveness, hatred and decadence’.Footnote ⁷ Much of the scholarship that followed in Grene's wake – such as Declan Kiberd's Synge and the Irish Language,Footnote ⁸ and Mary C. King's The Drama of J. M. Synge Footnote ⁹ – continued to model Synge as the exception to Ascendancy rule – as the Anglo-Irish renegade who developed a deep understanding of Irish culture. Kiberd, for example, adroitly demonstrated Synge's knowledge of the Irish language to advocate that the dramatist staunchly believed ‘in a fusion of the two Irelands, Gaelic and Anglo-Irish, so that neither should shed its pride’.Footnote ¹⁰

What was at stake for these scholars was an alternative reading of Synge's plays that tried to distance the dramatist from the sterile formalism of Anglo-Irish nationalism. Synge was acutely concerned with the cultural cost of Irish nationalism and his dramaturgy privileges those cultural formations that did not harmonize within Irish nationalism. Sinéad Garrigan Mattar's Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival is a concentric analysis of Synge's ‘intense engagement with scientific compartivism’, which allowed the dramatist to account for the cultural cost of nationalism.Footnote ¹¹ Garrigan Mattar points out how Synge used evolutionary and anthropological discourses to intervene in the colonial stereotype, which the dramatist feared would haunt Irish culture after independence from British rule. This is why Kiberd's essay ‘J. M. Synge – Remembering the Future’ in his Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation is particularly apposite.Footnote ¹²

However, the ethics that predicated Synge's articulation of those cultural logics that lurked between architectural fissures of Irish nationalism was brought into critical discourse by Paul Murphy's essay entitled ‘J. M. Synge and the Pitfalls of National Consciousness’, which first appeared in Theatre Research International and was expanded upon in his seminal work Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama 1899–1949.Footnote ¹³ Murphy's intervention in Synge scholarship gave credence to the supposition that Irish nationalism apropos of Synge's plays was redundant, but he complicated this by pointing out that Synge's plays were driven by Anglo-Irish anxieties as well as by issues of gender and class disparity. Murphy turned Irish nationalism apropos of Synge's drama on its head by interrogating those classed and gendered formations that had little or no access to political hegemony. The blame for this inequity was, according to Murphy, due to Synge's Anglo-Irish allegiance and to the fact that Synge's dramaturgical praxis was driven by ‘the Ascendancy trait of constructing the peasantry as fantasy objects which function as the key component in an ideological assault on [Catholic] bourgeois economics and a defence of aristocratic virtues’.Footnote ¹⁴ Murphy's paradigmatic shift re-established the question of Synge's Anglo-Irish heritage within critical discourse and it has called for a concentric consideration of Synge's ethics when staging those disenfranchised and, at times, subaltern formations.

Many scholars choose to ignore the question of Synge as Anglo-Irish peasant fetishizer and this, in turn, has produced some extremely rewarding scholarship – mostly emanating from the annual Synge Summer School in Ireland's County Wicklow. Nicholas Grene's Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School: 1991–2000 renegotiates Synge's life and work to foreground just how much of a rock ‘n’ roll kid Synge was in the Ireland of his time.Footnote ¹⁵ R. F. Foster's essay in that collection, ‘Good Behaviour: Yeats, Synge and Anglo-Irish Etiquette’, demonstrates how Synge struggled to conform to the received conventions of Anglo-Irish propriety. This is substantiated by Angela Bourke's essay in the same collection, ‘Keening as Theatre: J. M. Synge and the Irish Lament Tradition’, where Synge's religious iconoclasm is foregrounded through his staging of a prepolitical and pre-Christian ritual (the keen) on a stage of national–popular, even Catholic, sovereignty.

Patrick Lonergan, the current director of the Synge Summer School, has succeeded in bringing Synge scholarship (traditionally a literary terrain) into a dialogue with performance studies and discourses on globalization. Lonergan's Synge and His Influences: Centenary Essays from the Synge Summer School is a valuable collection of scholarship that articulates what Synge was influenced by and whom he has succeeded in influencing.Footnote ¹⁶ Melissa Sihra's essay in the collection, ‘Re-Location and Re-Locution: Adapting Synge’, reveals how Synge's dramaturgical praxis has been successfully adapted across the globe; Synge scholarship is a truly globalized discourse. But as Anthony Roche reminds us, Synge will always haunt the pages and the stages of Irish theatre.Footnote ¹⁷ Samuel Beckett could only think of one playwright who had a deep resonance on his praxis,Footnote ¹⁸ and one of Ireland's most popular contemporary playwrights, Marina Carr, continually returns to Synge's plays for aesthetic inspiration.Footnote ¹⁹ Synge would have understood why. Like all rock stars, he felt that no one else could please the crowd in the same way he could: ‘it just happens that I know Irish life the best, so I made my methods Irish’.Footnote ²⁰