Book Review: Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle

In a book about drama and Irish spectacle, one would naturally assume that the reactions to Synge\u27s The Playboy of the Western World, Yeats\u27s and Gregory\u27s The Countess Cathleen, and O\u27Casey\u27s The Plough and the Stars would be discussed, and one might be concerned - that this is all well-worn territory. While the reactions to these plays are discussed in Modernism, Drama. and the Audience for Irish Spectacle, by Paige Reynolds, and while the treatments of the plays and the concomitant situations themselves offer little that is really surprising or new, what is surprising and new is the context of these treatments amid other much less familiar incidents of Irish spectacle. By including .chapters on Dublin Suffrage Week, the death and funeral of Terence MacSwiney, and the 1924 Tailteann Games, Reynolds expands our conception of Irish spectacle,in exciting and provocative ways