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The paper examines Tom Murphy's play The Wake and the significance of its staging as part of the Abbey Theatre's 1916 centenary "Waking the Nation" programme. The play critiques the process by which various elements of capitalism -in particular materialistic culture, bourgeois morality and hypocrisy -combine to commodify, repress and eliminate the human body. Murphy suggests that the pitfalls of materialism point to the ironic truth that it denies the substantive materiality to our bodily existence. The female body in particular is continually subjected to violence and exploitation. By dramatising the emotional consequences of this immaterial materialism through the lens of a marginalised female émigré and sex worker, the play contests and subverts the woman / nation figurations in the context of Irish literary, theatrical and cultural imagination. The meaning of the wake ritual is revisited and experienced as a temporary celebration of theatre as community.

This paper analyzes Calvary with the focus on Yeats's ideas of subjectivity and individuality. The play is part of the Four Plays for Dancers (1921). It was inspired by Oscar Wilde's prose poem "Doer of the Good" (1894) and the formal techniques of Japanese Noh Theatre. The paper examines both the continuities and discrepancies between Oscar Wilde and Yeats in their spiritual and aesthetic affiliations and Yeats's use of Christian imagery, iconography, and narrative related to his system of Subjective-Objective antinomy. In exploring the theme of subjectivity, the debate between Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida that centers on the idea of hospitality is deployed to explain the relationship between the Christ figure and the other characters in the play.

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