Brian Friel, who was born and raised in Northern Ireland, is called the best living Irish dramatist dealing with subjects focused on Ireland and its people in his plays. In Faith Healer(1979), one of his best plays, Friel dramatizes a faith healer's experiences. The three characters, Frank(faith healer), Grace(Frank's wife), Teddy(Frank's manager) recollect the experiences they shared while travelling to cure the sick in Scotland and Wales. Their monologues detail the same experiences but are very different, according to Friel, because each recalls their memories according to their own desires and needs. Memory is not always accurate and can be a fiction. Frank has the compulsion to transform all things around him into fiction. This ability is analogous to a writer's creative writing ability. Therefore, Frank is, in a sense, an artist. Frank performs his faith healing shows in front of the sick with anxiety as he is not sure whether a miracle will occur or not. Like a faith healer, a dramatist as an artist writes dramas with anxiety because he is not sure that he will be able to move his audience with a successful performance. Frank is not sure that he will be able to move his audience. Frank is not sure if he has an ability to cure with miracles or if he is a con man. Like a faith healer, an artist has the sense of being a con man because he is indebted from his predecessors' works. Only through his death can Frank stop the maddening questions such as "Am I a con man? or am I endowed with a unique gift?" Frank is like a metaphor for an artist. Friel, a dramatist, also has suffered from the agony of an artist and has been troubled by the scarcity of his creative works. Therefore Frank is a foil to Friel's autobiographical image.

In the early twentieth century, Ireland was still under the colonial rule and the struggle for independence was at its height. Besides the political struggle, there were cultural movements and the Irish Dramatic Movement was one of those movements. W. B. Yeats was perhaps the most important leader in the Movement and his ideal was to create a national drama of Ireland and to have the Irish people recover their identity. Yeats wanted to create his own original dramatic form which was different from realistic dramas. In Yeats’s plays, imagery, symbols, style and plot are well organized and unified as an organic whole. Therefore, the characters usually have symbolic meanings. In Cathleen Ni Houlihan(1902), Cathleen is a symbol of Ireland. The setting of the play is a cottage of Killala in 1798. A young person named Michael is marrying Delia Cahel, a beautiful young girl. And a poor old woman enters the cottage and says that her land has been taken from her and many people have died for love of her. This is Cathleen ni Houlihan, a personification of Ireland. At the end of the play the poor old woman is transformed into a beautiful young girl. The woman can be a symbol of the sovereignty of Ireland and Michael can be a symbol of a king of Ireland. The transformation is the result of the symbolical marriage of land and king. Deirdre, the heroine of Deirdre(1907), is an important figure in the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology. In Yeats’s Deirdre, Deirdre comes back to Ireland from a long exile with her lover, Naoise with promises of King Conchubar’s forgiveness. However, the treachery of Conchubar is revealed and Naoise is killed. At last Deirdre commits suicide. In this play, Deirdre is an archetypal figure who symbolizes the exile and misfortune of Irish people under the colonial rule. Therefore, Deirdre can be considered as an apt symbol of Ireland. In the last scene, Deirdre does not lose her dignity and chooses her death. In the early twentieth century, Irish people felt a great sympathy for the tragic experience and misfortune of Cathleen Ni Houlihan and Deirdre in Yeats’s plays and they would consider them the symbols of Ireland. With the dramatization of those heroines, Yeats helped to encourage Irish people to recover national consciousness.