Modern Irish Drama: W. B. Yeats to Marina Carr, Second Edition

10. Marina Carr and the New Voices

150 Marina Carr and the New Voices M A R I N A C A R R (B. 1964) Marina Carr is the most significant and successful female Irish playwright since Lady Gregory. Her powerfully original plays have changed the ways women have been and will be represented in Irish drama at the expense of patriarchy and nationalist fervor. Carr was born in the Midlands’ County Offaly, the daughter of the playwright and novelist Hugh Carr. Carr graduated from University College, Dublin, and has had a remarkable career, including serving as writer in residence at the Abbey Theatre and Trinity College , Dublin. She now lives in County Kerry. Her plays, mainly tragedies of rural Irish life and based on classical Greek models, have had successful runs in Dublin at the Abbey, in London in the West End and at the Royal Court, and in New Jersey at the McCarter Theatre. They depict the struggles of Irish women who are often beset by male brutality and the tragedies of rural Irish life. Carr is a classicist who is entranced by the power of Greek mythology and who deals in black humor. Carr’s early performed dramas include Low in the Dark (1989), a neophyte’s absurdist farce exploring the landscape of sexuality while attacking sexism in language and the imagery of religion and paying homage to Beckett. The Deer’s Surrender (1990) is also influenced by Beckett. This Love Thing (1991) analyzes love through the M A R I N A C A R R A N D T H E N E W VOIC E S | 151 perspective of Renaissance artists. In Ullaloo (1991), a man and a woman strive for identity and meaning in life and death. The Mai (1994), a major success at the Abbey, is a tragic memory play that tells the story of four generations of women, each of whose life is a tangle of dreams, fantasies, and heart-wrenching disappointments , mitigated only by the love and sense of matriarchy the women share. Portia Coughlin (1996) was commissioned by Ireland’s National Maternity Hospital as part of its centenary celebration, and Carr based herself in the hospital while writing it. The play, like The Mai a woman’s drama, portrays a woman in despair who is haunted by the memory of her dead twin brother, who drowned fifteen years earlier. By the Bog of Cats (1998) is a brilliant retelling of Euripides’ Medea in the Irish Midlands. On Raftery’s Hill (2000) is a very dark tragedy of ugly rural life involving parental abuse, fear, and incest. Returning to classical Greek drama, Carr’s Ariel (2002) retells Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis. Meat and Salt (2003) depicts in fairy-tale fashion a young princess banished from the kingdom by her father. Women and Scarecrow (2006) concerns a worn-out woman who has birthed eight children and now faces death. The Cordelia Dream (2008) is a two-hander in which a woman and an older man question the element of hatred in their competition in art. Marble (2009) focuses on two male friends who dream about each other’s wives, those desperate housebound wives, and four lives unraveling. Plays Portia Coughlin (1996) It is Portia’s thirtieth birthday. She has been married for thirteen years to a successful businessman and has given birth to three sons, but she is unhappy and depressed, and she has little love for the institutions of marriage and motherhood because of the demands society makes 152 | PL A Y W R IG H T S A N D PL A Y S of those institutions. Her escape is through affairs, but they make her even less stable as her life dissolves in fears and fantasies. By the Bog of Cats (1998) Hester Swayne is Carr’s Medea. She is the common-law wife of a man named Carthage, and they have a daughter. Carthage has abandoned Hester to marry a wealthy farmer’s daughter. It is his opportunity for upward mobility and higher status in the Midlands community. Hester still loves Carthage and is in denial that the marriage will occur. When Carthage asks her to leave their home, she will not take his abuse lying down, and, as a result, the community will suffer too. Instead of leaving , Hester in vengeance sets fire to the house and Carthage’s new farm, burning everything, even the animals, to ashes. She then...