Post on 16-Oct-2014
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Heather Sell
Allison Campbell
THE 390
10 December 2011
Where in the world is Marina Carr? : Ireland and Marina Carr
Marina Carr is one of Ireland’s most famous playwrights, and who first rose to
fame during the late nineties and into the early 2000s. Many of Marina Carr’s plays take
place in Midlands Ireland, a place Carr knows well, as it is where she grew up. According
to the book Irish women writers: an A-to-Z guide, “Her first play Ullalo (1991), was
written at UCD [University College Dublin], though not performed at the Peacock until
more than three years later and two years after Low in the Dark.”1 Furthermore, Carr’s
work bears many similarities to the work of her predecessors (Beckett, Yeats, Lady
Gregory) and yet her work is oddly contemporary, set in a world that is isolated from and
yet very similar to our own. This paper will address the themes of Carr’s work, how her
work is similar to her fellow playwrights, past and present. In particular, I will focus on
how Carr uses the theme of the grotesque in her two plays Portia Coughlan and By the
Bog of Cats at lenght. The paper will also look at articles about how other productions
have been staged and what critics and reviewers thought of some of these productions.
1 Gonzalez, A. G. (2006). Irish women writers: an a-to-z guide. London: Greenwrood Press. Page 62
First, before I go into the themes of Carr’s work, I think it is important that we
learn a little about who Marina Carr is, where she grew up, and what her childhood was
like:
Carr grew up in Gortnamona, near Tullamore, and Pallas Lake, County Offaly.
She attended Sacred Heart School in Tullamore. While Carr was growing up, her
mother was the principal in a national school, and her father, Hugh Carr, wrote
novels and plays, including ones staged at the Abbey, Peacock, and Gate theaters
in Dublin. Carr was the second oldest of six children. Her mother, who also wrote
poetry, died when the playwright was seventeen. Carr attended University College
Dublin, where she read philosophy and English and participated in the Drama
Society, as both an actress and a writer.2
From the quote above, we can see that Carr grew up in a household where the arts and
expression were encouraged. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Carr followed
her father’s footsteps and became a playwright. As mentioned in the introduction, Carr’s
two plays Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats both use elements of the grotesque.
In her article “Ireland’s ‘exiled’ women playwrights: Teresa Deevy and Marina Carr,”
Cathy Leeney discusses the themes of alienation and exile and how they relate to the
work of both playwrights. While reading Carr’s By the Bog of Cats, I, too, was struck by
themes of grotesqueness as well as themes of alienation and exile. I wish to explore both
of those themes in more detail, especially how Carr’s two plays—Portia Coughlan, and
By the Bog of Cats—use these themes of the grotesque and alienation respectively. As an
2 Gonzalez, page 61-62
active reader of Carr’s work, I feel that exploring her work only for alienation or only for
the grotesqueness of her work will not do justice to a text that is so rich and layered with
symbolism. To read the play with only one of these things in mind is to miss the forest
for the trees—it would be catastrophic—like imagining the play without Hester’s
interactions with the fascinating Catwoman, or without the dead swan that ties Hester to
the bog forever. Here, my ultimate goal is to show how Carr uses the Irish landscape,
Greek tragedy, and constantly refers to earlier Irish playwrights to create a three-way
marriage between the grotesque, the past, and modern Ireland.
As mentioned, the grotesque is a prominent theme in Carr’s plays Portia
Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, grotesque
means, as an observation, “Of landscape: Romantic, picturesquely irregular”3. Both of
these plays give the audience female heroines who neither forgive nor ask permission for
what they do. Rather, they enter the theater as if they own it, demanding what they think
is rightfully theirs. Furthermore, the opening line of By the Bog of Cats is Hester
demanding to know “Who are you? Haven’t seen you around here before”4. Such a
statement is evocative, and the scene only gets more haunting from there, with the
mysterious person’s declaration “I’m a ghost fancier” and the revelation later that he is
looking for Hester herself. Likewise, with Portia Coughlan, the opening stage directions
are also evocative, albeit for different reasons:
Two isolating lights up. One on Portia Coughlan in her living room. She wears a
nightdress and a sweatshirt. Disheveled and barefoot, she stands, staring forward,
3 OED, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/81794?rskey=aj3p0D&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid25403634 Carr, 265
a drink in her hand; curtains closed. The other light comes up simultaneously on
Gabriel Scully, her dead twin. He stands at the bank of the Belmont River,
singing. They mirror one another’s posture and movements in an odd way;
unconsciously. Portia stands there, drinking lost-looking, listening to Gabriel’s
voice.5
As is evident by the stage directions, the play, By the Bog of Cats, is ridden with ghosts
and skeletons. I think it is safe to say that if Gabriel’s death were not an important part of
the plot—or if how he died did not affect Portia’s life in a remarkable way—his character
would have been demoted to a simple footnote. From the start of the play—just as she did
with By the Bog of Cats, Carr prepares the audience to embark on a journey of the
grotesque. Furthermore, with Portia Coughlan, Carr gives the audience a very different,
yet still assertive character. The first two lines of the play, delivered by her husband
Raphael, tell us a lot about her character: “Ah for fuck’s sake. Ten O’clock in the mornin’
and you’re at it already [drinking]”6. Like Hester, Portia cannot get over the absence of a
loved one, and returns throughout the play to the Belmont River, hoping and waiting for
him to return, even though she knows he is dead. Likewise, Hester Swane spends her
entire life waiting for her mother to return: “And I watched her walk away from me
across the Bog of Cats. And across the Bog of Cats I’ll watch her return.”7 Both Hester
and Portia are only reunited with their loved ones through death. Hester’s death, unlike
Portia’s, is foreshadowed at the beginning of the play. In a sense, the ghost fancier’s
presence acts as a prologue that catapults the characters into action and lets us know why
5 Carr, 1936 Carr, 1937 Carr, 297
Hester chooses this day of all days to act. There are many reasons why Hester would
choose this day to “go off the deep end”. Her former lover, Carthage Kilbride is getting
married that day to Caroline Cassidy, a girl Hester used to babysit. Another more
uncanny reason, relates to old Black Wing, the black swan we see Hester dragging at the
beginning of the play. Apparently, Hester’s mother told Catwoman “That child will live
as long as this swan, not a day more, not a day less.”8 Since the audience sawHester
dragging the corpse of Old Black Wing at the top of the show, it is clear that by the end
of the show either someone will kill Hester or she will take her own life. Matters are
complicated even more by the fact that the ghost fancier appeared, mistook dawn for
dusk, and thus claimed that he was “too previous.”9
As mentioned previously, my goal with this paper is to prove not only that Carr uses
the grotesque extremely well, but also that she borrows from past Irish playwrights. In his
article “Talking with Ghosts of Irish Playwrights Past: Marina Carr’s By the Bog of
Cats,” Richard Russell discusses how Carr has been influenced by her predecessors.
Russell addresses how the ghosts of the play are not the only ghosts present in the text,
and that the play has “the ghostly presence of Irish dramatists from the past, whose work
Carr has heavily drawn on, yet modified-suggests how best to understand the
comparative dramatic context of the play”.10 Concerning chapter 11, “The Book of the
Dead,” in Homer’s Odyssesy, Carr has this to say:
Homer talking about writing and how to gain access to hidden knowledge, to the
past, to the dead, to that other world. And what he seems to be saying is you must 8 Carr, 2759 Carr, 26710 Russell, Richard. "Talking with Ghosts of Irish Playwrights: Marina Carr's By the Bog if Cats." Comparative Drama. 40.2 (Summer 2006): ppp-pp 149-168. Print.
give blood, blood being the sacrifice demanded for the tongues or the ear of the
dead. [These passages from Homer demonstrate] incredible bravery on the part of
the writer. It’s about the courage to sit down and face the ghosts and have a
conversation with them. It’s about going over to the other side and coming back
with something, new, hopefully; gold, possibly.11
Carr’s thoughts on Homer’s Odyssey suggest that the author has a keen sense of how
death works—and how it shouldn’t work. Her characters often cling to death for a little
too long, and as is often the case, take more than skeletons with them to their graves.
They take their skeletons, other people, and grievances with them: Hester kills her own
daughter before the ghost fancier arrives and the two enter into a “dance of death”.12
Furthermore, Russell’s article mentions Yeats’s belief that language should be at the
center of his plays: “I wanted to get rid of irrelevant movement, the stage must become
still that words might keep all their vividness, and I wanted vivid words.”13 The
playwrights Lady Augusta Gregory and John Millington Synge also shared Yeats’s belief
that language was more important than movement. Moreover, Russell cites Hester’s
disdain, in act 1, scene 5, for the contract she has signed that gives her house and property
over to her former love, Carthage Kilbride, and his fiancé, Carolina Cassidy: “Bits of
writin’, means nothin’, can as aisy be unsigned."14 In a way, Carr has taken their advice
to heart, and uses movement only at key points in the text: Hester dragging the dead
swan, and the dance of death. Furthermore, language, especially in plays of Irish descent
and content, should have language at their heart, given that the dialect and language of
11 Marina Carr, quoted in Richard Russell, 15012 Carr, 339-34113 Willliam Butler Yeats, quoted in Richard Russell, 15114 Marina Carr, cited in Richard Russell, 154
the Irish is a rich one. Both Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats are written with a
midlands Irish accent in mind. On the character personae page for Portia Coughlan,
Marina Carr writes that the accent is “Midland. I’ve given some flavor in the text, but the
Midland accent is more rebellious than the written word permits.”15 Carr does something
similar for By the Bog of Cats: “I’ve given a slight flavor in the text, but the real Midland
accent is a lot flatter and rougher and more guttural than the written word allows.”16
In their article “Performing Ireland: new perspectives on contemporary Irish
theater,” Brian Singleton and Anna McMullan address the ever devolving Irish theater
scene. According to the article, “The phenomenal rise in arts funding in the past ten years
in the Republic of Ireland has been a symptom of a booming economy which began
roughly in 1993.”17 The article went on to discuss how the economic boom of the nineties
led to an increase of funding in the theater. I mention this because Carr’s play By the Bog
of Cats had its world premiere at the Abbey Theater as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival
on October 7, 1998. The play premiered during a time of economic security, and yet, her
characters are so far removed from the world in which Carr wrote the play. In that regard,
Marina Carr occupies an interesting place in contemporary theater in the sense that her
work is more tied to the past than it is to the present. Many of her plays take elements of
past Irish playwrights, reference or rewrite Greek tragedies in modern times. While the
setting of her plays is indeed “the present,”18 her characters constantly put more stake in
the past and its implications on their lives than they do on the present. Case in point,
15 Carr, 19116 Carr, 26117 Singleton, Brian, and Anna mcMullan. "Performing Ireland: new perspectives on contemporary Irish theater." Australasian Drama Studies. .43 (Oct 2003): ppp-pp 3-15. Print.18 Carr, 191 and 261 respectively
Portia cannot get over the death of her twin brother Gabriel, and we later find out that
they had planned to commit suicide together in the Belmont River, but she backed out at
the last minute. Likewise, Hester is haunted by what Catwoman calls a “fierce wrong […]
that’s caught up with ya,”19 which we later find out is the murder of Joseph Swane, her
long lost brother. In a sense, Portia and Hester invent shadows—they live in dark worlds
of their own mind and give no mind to the world that continues to turn around them,
regardless of the consequences. The consequences of these invented shadows, or, rather,
living in the past, is Portia’s eventual suicide in Act two and Hester’s sacrificial murder
of her daughter Josie and her subsequent dance of death with the ghost fancier.
The stake that Hester and Portia put in the past, and the extent to which they go to
remain in the past, or to drag other characters down with them, is reminiscent of the
grotesque. In Portia Coughlan, we see a character haunted by the death and yet there is
no blood on her hands as there was with Hester’s murder of Joseph Swane, since Gabriel
drowned. Usually, with drowning, a person struggles to breathe and stay above water—
Hester cut Joseph’s throat and had to wash the blood off of her hands. Portia, on the other
hand, had to live with the guilt that she had backed out of their pact, and that there was no
concrete evidence that she had had any part in Gabriel’s demise, just a notion hanging
over her head that she had indeed played a part in his death. Portia’s real challenge is
living with herself after the death of her twin, which, ultimately, ends up being
impossible. In the play, the element of the grotesque comes not only from the bloodless
death of Gabriel, but from the closeness of the twins:
19 Carr, 274
Came out of the womb holding hands—When God was handing’ out souls he
must’ve got mine and Gabriel’s mixed up, aither that or he gave us just the one
between us and it went into the Belmont River with him—Oh, Gabriel, ya had no
right to discard me so, to float me on the world as if I were a ball of flotsam. Ya
had no right.20
In the quote above, Portia discusses the closeness of herself and Gabriel in grotesque
terms—so much so that it should come as no surprise that the two of them had a sexual
relationship. In a way, Carr sets this up was a precursor to that revelation, as if she as
playwright is preparing the audience for that discovery and sets up part of its history.
Moreover, Carr later reveals that Portia’s parents are brother and sister, so the sexual
relationship of Portia and Gabriel comes off as destiny. The two of them come from
incest and then go out of this world through incest: Gabriel sees Portia with another man
and becomes guilty, and the suicide pact comes about. The grotesque in this play comes
more from a mixture from the landscape and the family history. On the other hand, the
grotesqueness in By the Bog of Cats seems to stem from the landscape of the bog, which
is easily enacted upon. In Portia’s world, the Belmont River is a landscape that both gives
life and takes it away—the habitation surrounding the river receives nourishment from
the river’s water and the river ultimately takes the life of Gabriel and Portia respectively.
However, the deaths of these two characters are far from accidental: Gabriel’s death
fifteen years before the play takes place was suicide, just as Portia’s death on her thirtieth
birthday is suicide as well.
20 Carr, 211
The third part of the “three-way marriage” I mentioned in the opening paragraph
is Carr’s link to Greek tragedy. Carr’s play By the Bog of Cats is a modern day portrayal
of Euripides’s Medea. In the original tragedy, Medea is a lover who is ousted and
exchanged for a new, younger lover. Medea, like Hester, refuses to accept her alienation.
Medea poisons a dress and jewels, which she has her children deliver to the princess, who
is to be married to Medea’s former lover, Jason, that day. The difference between the
two plays is that the action of Medea takes place off-stage and is described through
dialogue. Carr uses the grotesque nature of the tragedy of Medea to enhance her play.
The opening image of Hester dragging the swan, Hester showing up at the wedding, and
the sacrificial killing of Josie and subsequent dance of death all occur on stage. The only
action not to occur on stage is the burning of the house, farm, and the cattle. However, we
see the aftermath and the havoc that ensues and I think it is safe to say that it is this that
causes the themes of the play to come full circle. Carr’s other play, Portia Coughlan,
while not a direct translation of a Greek tragedy, certainly has elements of tragedy in it.
One could certainly consider Portia Coughlan to be a tragic hero, but a modern day tragic
hero with several deathly flaws, some of them perhaps more fatal than others. The main
flaw, of course, is that she is haunted by her twin brother’s death and the fact that she did
not follow through with their planned suicide.
Now that I have gone over the grotesque themes of Marina Carr’s plays By the
Bog of Cats and Portia Coughlan, I will discuss where her works have been produced.
Carr’s work was recently seen at Villanova University. According to an article from
Stage Magazine, about a recent production of Carr’s work at Villanova, Woman and
Scarecrow, the university has recently begun a relationship with the Abbey Theater:
Villanova University’s highly respected Theatre Department is beginning an
exchange program with Ireland’s celebrated Abbey Theatre; the two institutions
will be working together to further enrich their artistic and intellectual traditions.
Students from Villanova will be afforded the opportunity to study with the Abbey
in Dublin and artists from there will spend time at the University. There will be
lectures, workshops and community conversations as the University offers a
“home away from home” for the Abbey. The inaugural event in this exchange is
the Theatre’s production of Marina Carr’s WOMAN AND SCARECROW,
onstage at Vasey Hall November 8th thru the 20th.21
In that same article, the writer mentions, “Death—and dying; the Irish (and I am one)
seem to be obsessed with this topic. Don’t know why this is, but it is a subject oft
explored in the theatre of my heritage.”22 Furthermore, Marina Carr has had seventeen
premiers at the Abbey Theater:
Marble is Marina’s seventh premiere at the Abbey. Previous plays first performed
here are Ullaloo, The Mai, Portia Coughlan, By the Bog of Cats, Ariel and Meat
and Salt. Other plays include On Raftery’s Hill (Druid/Royal Court), Low in the
Dark (Project Arts Centre), Woman and Scarecrow (Royal Court), The Cordelia
Dream (RSC) and The Giant Blue Hand (The Ark). Awards include The
Macaulay Fellowship, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the E.M. Forster
Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has held the
Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova. She was the 1932 fellow at 21 http://stagepartners.org/2011/11/raging-against-the-dying-of-the-light-villanova-presents-marina-carrs-woman-and-scarecrow/22 http://stagepartners.org/2011/11/raging-against-the-dying-of-the-light-villanova-presents-marina-carrs-woman-and-scarecrow/
Princeton for 2008. She currently teaches playwriting at Trinity College Dublin
where she is an honorary professor. A member of Aosdána, Marina lives in Kerry
with her husband and four children.23
The McCarter theater in New Jersey was one of the first theaters in the United States to
put on Carr’s work:
Phaedra Backwards is a McCarter commission, and it’s the third time one of her
plays has been staged at the theater. She and Emily Mann, McCarter’s artistic
director and the director of Phaedra’s Backwards, first met 15 years ago when Ms.
Mann saw one of Ms. Carr’s plays in London. That led to The Mai being staged in
Princeton in 1996, followed by Portia Coughlan in 1999.24
In conclusion, it is clear that Marina Carr’s plays explore elements of the
grotesque, and that her work is prominent. Her work is being produced all over the world,
with future productions coming up in the U.S. Carr was a prominent playwright during
the nineties and well into the 2000s, and fortunately for theatergoers, it doesn’t look like
she shows any desire of quitting writing.
23 http://www.abbeytheatre.ie/people/view/marina_carr/24 http://www.centraljersey.com/articles/2011/11/02/time_off/entertainment_news/doc4eb1cd9c084c6563972360.txt
Works Cited
Gonzalez, A. G. (2006). Irish women writers: an a-to-z guide. London: Greenwrood
OED, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/81794?rskey=aj3p0D&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid2540363
Russell, Richard. "Talking with Ghosts of Irish Playwrights: Marina Carr's By the Bog if Cats." Comparative Drama. 40.2 (Summer 2006): ppp-pp 149-168. Print.
Singleton, Brian, and Anna mcMullan. "Performing Ireland: new perspectives on contemporary Irish theater." Australasian Drama Studies. .43 (Oct 2003): ppp-pp 3-15. Print.