‘In the Shadow of the Glen’ is a one-act play by the Irish playwright J.M. Synge (1871 to 1909), first performed in Dublin in October 1903. It was the first of Synge’s plays to be performed on stage at the start of the short career which saw him become a key figure in the Irish literary renaissance. It is set in an isolated cottage in County Wicklow in ‘the present’ i.e. circa 1903.

Synopsis

We are among peasants in a remote valley in rural Ireland. We are inside an isolated peasant cottage. The curtain goes up on Nora Burke, a bereaved wife, sitting in the same room where her deceased husband, Dan Burke, is laid out in bed with a sheet over him.

The action starts when a tramp knocks at the door and asks shelter from the pouring rain outside. They talk: Nora explains the presence of the corpse, explains how her husband was much older than her, was always a cold man, died that morning and she hasn’t had time to trek to the nearest settlement and find someone to mourn with or help her. Dead he is and her with 100 sheep on the hill and no turf cut for the fire.

NORA: Then he went into his bed and he was saying it was destroyed he was, the time the shadow was going up through the glen, and when the sun set on the bog beyond he made a great lep, and let a great cry out of him, and stiffened himself out the like of a dead sheep.

And: ‘it was only after dying on me he was when the sun went down’, so just that evening.

When the tramp asks why the body isn’t properly laid out Nora explains the dead man made her swear nobody could touch his body except his sister, and she lives ten miles away.

Conversation weaves round to the death of a legendary local figure, Patch Darcy, and the tramp tells how he was the last to hear his voice alive. Nora fondly remembers Darcy who’d always pop into the isolated cottage to say hello and cheer her long lonely days.

When she asks if he saw anyone on the way, the tramp says he saw a young man with a drift of mountain ewes. Nora recognises the description of a young man who lives locally; her husband would go to a certain place in the path and whistle for him if he needed any help. Nora suddenly asks if the tramp can stay in the cottage and mind the corpse while she goes to get this man. Reluctant to stay the tramp says he’ll go but Nora insists there’s a special place she has to be whistling from and only she knows it. So she wraps a shawl round her and exits into the rain.

As soon as she’s left, to my incredulity, the corpse in the bed sits up, the sheet slipping off him, and the old white-haired man reveals that he’s not dead after all! In fact, his pretending to be dead is a trick to catch his wife out!! Once the tramp has gotten over his shock, Dan asks him to pour him a whiskey: he’s parched and has been plagued by a fly walking round his nose.

TRAMP: (Doubtfully.) Is it not dead you are?
DAN: How would I be dead, and I as dry as a baked bone, stranger?

The tramp warns Dan that he can hear Nora returning, so Dan lies back down and gets the tramp to rearrange the sheet over him.

Enter Nora with the simple, handsome young man Micheal Dara. He’s shocked to see the corpse. Nora suggests the tramp goes and rest in the other room, obviously wanting to get him out of the way, but he insists on staying where the whiskey is.

Nora and Micheal’s conversation dwells on how lonely she was, how she looked forward to any man passing by and stopping for a chat. Micheal complains how difficult it is to control a herd of ewes and she says you need to be a real man to do that, someone like Patch Darcy, ‘God spare his soul’ – and they both pause to revere the memory of Patch Darcy, obviously a local legend for his fitness and charm, although he apparently went mad.

MICHEAL: (Uneasily.) Is it the man went queer in his head the year that’s gone?
NORA: It is surely.

Nora tells Micheal she’s a hard woman to please as she was a difficult girl. So why did she marry an ornery old man like Dan?

NORA: What way would I live and I an old woman if I didn’t marry a man with a bit of a farm, and cows on it, and sheep on the back hills?
MICHEAL: (Considering.) That’s true, Nora, and maybe it’s no fool you were, for there’s good grazing on it, if it is a lonesome place, and I’m thinking it’s a good sum he’s left behind.

Nora has a great speech about the loneliness of living in such an isolated place:

NORA: I do be thinking in the long nights it was a big fool I was that time, Micheal Dara, for what good is a bit of a farm with cows on it, and sheep on the back hills, when you do be sitting looking out from a door the like of that door, and seeing nothing but the mists rolling down the bog, and the mists again, and they rolling up the bog, and hearing nothing but the wind crying out in the bits of broken trees were left from the great storm, and the streams roaring with the rain.

She lists the local people she’s seen growing old or the children growing up and getting married, all while she’s been stuck in the same kitchen boiling food for her husband, or the brood sow, baking cakes at nightfall. The loneliness and sense of futility. What with tramps and futility, I couldn’t help hearing anticipations of Samuel Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot would be staged exactly 50 years after Shadow.

Before these speeches Micheal had asked how much Dan left and she had plonked down on the table a stocking full of coins, their complete savings. During her speeches Micheal had been totting these up and now announces it amounts to £5 and ten notes (shillings?). He goes on to say he recently sold his lambs at market for the princely sum of £20, and then out of the blue announces that he’ll marry her in the chapel of Rathvanna, and they’ll have the property, lots of sheep and money in the bank.

But Nora isn’t relieved, she dismisses this as more pipe dreams, saying Micheal himself will only get as old and gaga as Dan. Again this emphasis on the inevitability of bodily decay strongly anticipates Beckett’s miserabilism.

NORA: Why would I marry you, Mike Dara? You’ll be getting old and I’ll be getting old, and in a little while I’m telling you, you’ll be sitting up in your bed—the way himself was sitting—with a shake in your face, and your teeth falling, and the white hair sticking out round you like an old bush where sheep do be leaping a gap…

It’s a pitiful thing to be getting old, but it’s a queer thing surely. It’s a queer thing to see an old man sitting up there in his bed with no teeth in him, and a rough word in his mouth, and his chin the way it would take the bark from the edge of an oak board you’ld have building a door.

Micheal puts his arms around her and is starting in on persuading how fine life will be living with a young man like him when Dan the corpse sneezes (again, as he had at the start of his chat with the tramp) and scares the daylights out of Nora and Dan.

Dan makes a bolt for the door but Dan in his nightshirt waving a big stick beats him to it and stands with his back to the door, barring egress. While the other two are still adjusting, Dan opens the door and tells Nora that despite all her talk of the mist coming down and young men and old men he’s kicking her out.

The tramp intervenes to say this is harsh, what will she do? Dan launches in on a great diatribe, envisioning homeless Nora become a beggar, sleeping in ditches and begging at crossroads.

DAN: It’s lonesome roads she’ll be going and hiding herself away till the end will come, and they find her stretched like a dead sheep with the frost on her, or the big spiders, maybe, and they putting their webs on her, in the butt of a ditch.

In effect a great curse. The tramp says maybe Micheal will go with her, marry her after all. But both Nora and Dan point out, what would he want with her now? Still married and penniless?

At which point the tramp plays the part of a gentleman and offers to accompany her out.

TRAMP: (Going over to Nora.) We’ll be going now, lady of the house—the rain is falling, but the air is kind and maybe it’ll be a grand morning by the grace of God.

He is kind and starts to wax lyrical about the life of a tramp, greeting each day as new and really knowing the weather, rather than stuck in this house day in day out for years of frustration. He’s in mid-lyrical flow when Dan crudely interrupts him and tells her to get out. But the tramp resumes and delivers a lyrical description of the freedom of the road:

TRAMP: (At the door.) Come along with me now, lady of the house, and it’s not my blather you’ll be hearing only, but you’ll be hearing the herons crying out over the black lakes, and you’ll be hearing the grouse and the owls with them, and the larks and the big thrushes when the days are warm, and it’s not from the like of them you’ll be hearing a talk of getting old like Peggy Cavanagh, and losing the hair off you, and the light of your eyes, but it’s fine songs you’ll be hearing when the sun goes up, and there’ll be no old fellow wheezing, the like of a sick sheep, close to your ear.

Nora makes a last speech cursing Dan:

NORA: (turns to Dan.) You think it’s a grand thing you’re after doing with your letting on to be dead, but what is it at all? What way would a woman live in a lonesome place the like of this place, and she not making a talk with the men passing? And what way will yourself live from this day, with none to care for you? What is it you’ll have now but a black life, Daniel Burke, and it’s not long I’m telling you, till you’ll be lying again under that sheet, and you dead surely.

And so she and the tramp exit. Dan makes as if to strike terrified Micheal but changes his mind and invites him to share a glass with him. So the pair sit at the table and toast each other, Micheal sincerely wishing the crabby old man long life and health, in an ironic conclusion.

(Hugh Kenner in his book about the Irish Literary Revival, points out that this last-minute reconciliation actually signposts that Dan realises that Micheal is himself when young, harmless, timid, fond of a drink: Dan is the bitter old age weak Micheal is fated to. ‘They epiromise the first and last of all she has walked out of’ – Kenner, page 154.)

Cast

• Daniel Burke, an elderly farmer
• Nora Burke, his young wife
• A Tramp
• Michael Dara, a youthful shepherd

A comedy

When I opened ‘In the Shadow of the Glen’ online and started reading it I had no idea it was a comedy. The sadness of Nora’s loneliness, the railing of her angry old husband, her final curse on him, and her bleak exit into the pouring rain, condemned to a life of vagrancy – all this struck me as harshly tragic. It seemed to me a bleak and hard piece of work with only the weird conceit of the husband playing dead at its centre like a piece of surreal absurdism. It was only when I came to read introductions and commentary around it that I discovered it was a comedy.

Forty-six years ago I learned a profound truth about the theatre, which is that audiences need to have it clearly signposted to them what kind of play they are watching and only then feel confident in reacting appropriately.

In 1980 I went to see the Old Vic production of Macbeth starring Peter O’Toole. This was a famous flop, the bad set and terrible acting bringing down a storm of obloquy on all concerned. What amazed me was that, having been told it was bad, the audience started laughing and tittering as the curtain went up, before the play had even started. Given license to find the funny side, the audience howled with laughter at the crudity of the witches and the naivety of the thane, at the obviously fake knives Macbeth and wife used to kill the king and so on. Every detail which, in a successful and serious production, the audience would quail in horror at, was, because the audience had been informed beforehand that it was a flop, greeted with howls of laughter.

Here’s a video of a great production by the Druid Theatre Company directed by Garry Hynes and filmed by RTE. You can hear from the audience response that they find some lines of dialogue funny, and certainly find the two moments when Dan rises from the dead funny (although, in my opinion, neither moment is really as startling as it should be). And the director’s added the farcical detail of Micheal shinning up a ladder when Dan threatens him which isn’t, I think, in the text.

So there are certainly comic elements. But it’s not really a comedy, is it? It doesn’t leave you with a smile on your lips. The vision of Nora wasting her life away, the picture of the women she’s seen go mad and handsome young Patch Darcy go mad, and her and the tramp’s (initial) vision of living as a vagrant in the rain and the fog, and Dan’s merciless kicking her out of his house forever, and her vision of the inevitability of death and decay – not a barrel of laughs, is it? Leaves a pretty bleak aftertaste.

Instead what it has, still has, is a vision of the serious treatment of peasant life which (the commentaries tell me) was absolutely new and revolutionary at the time and, like all real innovations in the arts, remains powerful and unsettling to this day.

Video

Nationalist objections

At the time, the play caused a furore. It was slammed by Irish nationalists for portraying Irish womanhood as debased and immoral. Reviewers seem to have thought that Nora voluntarily left her husband to go a-tramping whereas, as we’ve seen, she is unambiguously thrown out by her furious husband. Nonetheless it was roundly attacked in the press.

Nationalists were super-sensitive to slights against the Irish character. For centuries Irish characters had been portrayed by the Protestant English as comic stereotypes; for strict nationalists, a play like this looked like a small cohort of cosmopolitan (and mostly Protestant – Yeats, Gregory) writers doing just the same kind of thing, albeit in a pretentious way – again, making out Ireland’s peasantry to be drunk and promiscuous. Hence:

‘A foul libel on Irish womanhood’ – the Irish Independent

‘one of the nastiest little plays ever seen’ –

‘excessively distasteful and cast slurs on Irish womanhood’ – the Irish Times

‘Synge is pandering to the enemies of Ireland. The play is a corrupt version of an old tale that derives its imagination from the decadence that passes current in the Latin Quarter and the London Salon. Synge, who is utterly a stranger to the Irish character as any Englishman, has yet denigrated us for the enlightenment of his countrymen… [the play represents] adultery as a feature of Irish moral life ‘ – Arthur Griffith in the United Irishman

[the theatre should support] ‘the forces of virile nationalism in their fight against the widespread spirit of decadence, instead of undermining them’ – James Connolly, one of the leaders of the Easter Rising

You have to admire the guiding spirit of the theatre, poet and playwright W.B. Yeats, for standing up to all this bullying; and Synge, for not giving a damn. (All these quotes are given in the chapter devoted to the original production in Ulick O’Connor’s gossipy, readable account of the Irish Literary Renaissance.)

Nora

The name ‘Nora’ obviously triggers memories of Henrik Ibsen’s famous play A Doll’s House (1879) in which the docile and compliant housewife Nora (Helmer) comes to realise what a doormat she’s become and decides to leave her husband to become a free woman. Clearly something very similar happens here to an identically named woman, Nora (Burke). There must be thousands of essays comparing the two. Here’s a handy summary:

Shared themes: both plays highlight patriarchal constraints on the female lead, her loss of self within marriage, and the need to leave and find her true identity.

Context: Nora Helmer acts within a 19th-century urban middle-class setting while Nora Burke acts within a rural, peasant setting. Helmer lives a sociable life in a busy city but realises she is trapped by society’s imposition of patriarchal gender roles, whereas Burke’s motives are more to do with crushing isolation, and the frustration of her healthy desire by being tied to a cold and (by implication) sexless old man.

Result: Both Noras choose to walk out of their homes into the unknown, choosing freedom over security.

Related links

• In the Shadow of the Glen on Planet Gutenberg

J.M. Synge reviews

• In the Shadow of the Glen (1903)
• Riders to the Sea (1904)
• The Well of the Saints (1905)
• The Playboy of the Western World (1907)
• The Tinker’s Wedding (1908)

Related reviews

• Ireland reviews