George Cusack, The Politics of Identity in Irish Drama: W. B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory and J. M. Synge‪.‬

George Cusack, The Politics of Identity in Irish Drama: W. B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory and J. M. Synge, New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2009. 185 pages. USD $103.00. George Cusack's The Politics of Identity in Irish Drama: W. B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory and J. M. Synge (Routledge 2009) is an accessible, knowledgeable, well-written and extensively researched work. Cusack's primary argument is that despite the appearance of a decline in consensus between the directors and audience of the National Theatre between the performance of the wildly popular Kathleen ni Houlihan (1902) and the notorious production of Playboy of the Western World that resulted in the 1907 riots and effectively brought down the curtain of their work through the marginalization of the National Theatre, the directors had always intended their early plays to be understood as more than jingoistic propaganda; their later plays, including Synge's Playboy, were also more consistent with Gaelic nationalism than these works might previously have been seen, even though they did intentionally provoke the audience. My only real criticism of Cusack's work is that his interpretations are so consistent that they lend the appearance of a 'too-neatness,' or that his readings fit too well with the rhetorical structure he elaborates at the outset: political moderation revealed by the subtle craft in all the works. And yet his nuanced analyses of numerous plays and supplementary works by Yeats, Gregory and Synge are careful and convincing, and the logic of such an assertion so sensible, that this uniformity serves primarily to make his argument all the more compelling.