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  • The Theatre Of Marina Carr: “Before Rules Was Made.”
  • Deirdre O’Leary
The Theatre Of Marina Carr: “Before Rules Was Made.” Edited by Cathy Leeney and Anna McMullan. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003; pp. 270. $28.95 paper.

As recently as 1993 a well-known theatre director in Dublin remarked, "There are no Irish women playwrights," responding to an audience member's question as to why there were so few women playwrights produced at Ireland's theatres. The validity of that claim was challenged the same year, with Glasshouse Productions commissioning two seasons of extracts from women's plays, and Theatre Ireland devoting a special issue to the position of women within Irish theatre. Ironically, Theatre Ireland folded after the women in theatre issue and no work by a woman dramatist was premiered on the Abbey Theatre main stage for another five years, until Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats . . . in [End Page 727] 1998. Marina Carr's career and international reputation as one of the leading contemporary playwrights in Ireland, male or female, offers the most cogent rebuttal to the 1993 claim.

Though there is a growing body of scholarship on the theatre of Marina Carr, due largely to journal articles and essays by Anna McMullan, Melissa Sihra, and Claudia Harris, The Theatre of Marina Carr is the first collection of essays to be published on Carr's dramatic writing. The book is organized into thirteen chapters and includes academic essays by leading Irish theatre scholars, including Anthony Roche and Clare Wallace, as well as first-person narrative accounts by theatre practitioners—actors, dramaturgs, and directors who have all participated in the Irish or American premieres of Carr's plays. Also included are original program notes of the Abbey and Peacock theatre productions of The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1996), and By the Bog of Cats . . . (1998), along with the original reviews of those productions by theatre criticsFintan O'Toole(Irish Times) and Medb Ruane(Sunday Times). The collection also includes photographs of select American and European productions of Carr's major works. While Carr's plays are widely published and read as literary texts, the purpose of the collection is, according to the editors, "to consider the plays as theatre, embodied in the space time of performance and mediated by both the specific contexts of location, publicity, expectations and the broader contexts of cultural or intercultural translation and historical moment" (xvi). The collection is a complex and oftentimes seamless merging of the theoretical and the practical, with articulate, varied, and often disagreeing voices of academics and practitioners engaged in a contrapuntal discussion of the complex work of Carr, a writer who consistently crosses genres from metatheatrical absurdist farces to her more recent plays, which rely on intertextuality, myth, realism, and the grotesque.

The plays are largely examined in chronological order. Carr's first play, Ullaloo, is not included and the collection begins instead with actor Sarahjane Scaife's account of the collaborative rehearsal process and production of Carr's absurdist second work, Low in the Dark, in 1989. Scaife notes that the play's development coincided with the emerging Independent Theatre Association in Dublin and contextualizes the play within Dublin's growing experimental theatre movement.

Following Scaife's essay is Anthony Roche's rather traditional study of the dramatic structure of Carr's The Mai, positing a link between the work and Teresa Deevy's Katie Roche (1936) and Synge's The Shadow of the Glen (1903). Roche establishes a theoretical line of inquiry regarding the in-between space in Carr's dramatic worlds that many of the scholars in the collection also address. The collection is at its most compelling when the scholars explore the contested notions of space in Carr's works and how this is achieved in performance. Melissa Sihra's penetrative study of the liminality of Carr's midlands locale is in conversation with Enrica Cerquoni's essay on the challenges three different theatre companies faced in staging Carr's By the Bog of Cats . . . . The reader has the added benefit of seeing photographs from the productions Sihra and Cerquoni examine.

Clare Wallace analyzes the tenuous notion of authenticity in Carr...

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