THE WAKE AND THE WEDDING: RITUAL FORM IN SYNGE AND CONOR MCPHERSON

Abstract

This article examines the dramatic architectures of John Millington Synge and Conor McPherson, arguing that both playwrights deploy communal rituals — wakes, storytelling sessions, weddings, seasonal gatherings, and supernatural encounters — not merely as thematic content but as foundational structural principles of their dramaturgy. While Irish drama has been frequently analysed through the lenses of nationalism, postcolonial identity, language, and landscape, its formal debt to ritual structures remains comparatively underexplored. By placing Synge’s early-twentieth-century plays (Riders to the Sea, Deirdre of the Sorrows, The Playboy of the Western World, In the Shadow of the Glen into sustained dialogue with McPherson’s contemporary works (The Weir, Shining City, The Seafarer, St Nicholas), this study demonstrates that ritual form, in their hands, resists the linear, secular temporality of modern realism. Drawing on the performance theory of Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, and Catherine Bell, the article distinguishes between ritual as content (a play that depicts a ritual) and ritual as form (a play whose very structure enacts ritual logic — repetition, cyclicality, transformation, communitas). The work argues that in the work of these two playwrights, ritual allows the dead to remain present, time to fold back upon itself, and community to cohere through shared performance rather than through conventional Aristotelian plotting. Despite the century separating them, both Synge and McPherson use ritual as a dramaturgical architecture that challenges dominant theatrical forms and offers an alternative grounded in communal, cyclical, and sacred time. The article ultimately positions this ritual dramaturgy as a formal critique of modernity’s temporal regime, preserving modes of knowledge, mourning, and community that colonial and capitalist modernities have repeatedly sought to displace.