Greek myths and Irish bog gothic make for potent mix at the Abby

The themes may be ancient, but Marina Carr’s tales of tough women in repressive communities feel as relevant as ever, writes Padraic Killeen.

ONE of Ireland’s most acclaimed playwrights, Marina Carr, first came to prominence in the 1990s with her ‘Midlands Plays’, a series of lyrical dramas that blended Greek myth with Irish ‘bog gothic’.

Steeped in symbolism, the supernatural, and in an all-pervasive sense of loss, these dark but blackly comic plays frequently pitted ferocious, uncontainable women against rancorous, repressive communities that would inhibit them.

By the Bog of Cats — arguably the most famous of the lot — begins a new run at the Abbey Theatre this week, 17 years after its 1998 debut on the same stage. For Carr, 51,whose work is deeply concerned with memory and time’s passing, the play’s revival makes for an intriguing experience.

@AbbeyTheatre Really exciting and moving performance of #ByTheBogofCats last night. Susan Lynch was stunning!

— Rebecca Graham (@RebeccaUCC) August 15, 2015

“I had just had my first child a couple of weeks before the 1998 production,” recalls the Offaly-born playwright. “So I was a bit ‘gone away’, as they say. But it was a very exciting time. I remember going into rehearsals to see the director, Patrick Mason, and all the actors. Doing it again now, you think of the people who have died since the original production. Joan O’Hara was in the original, and Pauline Flanagan and Eamon Kelly. So there is a real sense of the wheel turning. I’m going on. And these people are gone. And they were three actors who I had great admiration for.”

Their spirits “hover around benignly”, she says. “But they are there and you do feel them.”

Of course, I point out that we are just three minutes into our conversation and already Marina Carr is talking about death. It provokes a little laughter.

“Well, it’s the great fact about all our lives, isn’t it? And we spend most of our time trying to avoid it. It’s like death is something that happens to other people. But then, suddenly, you’re on the top of the pile yourself, and there’s nothing between you and eternity.”

Reworking the Medea myth, By the Bog of Cats tells the tale of Hester Swane (Susan Lynch), an enigmatic woman deeply adrift from her community, who is driven to a devastating act when the man she loves brutally casts her aside. Greek myth exerts a profound influence on all of Carr’s work — her new version of Euripides’ Hecuba is currently being produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon — and she insists that the questions the Greek dramatists asked are no less relevant today.

“We’re still trying to define what the human is,” she says. “That’s what the Greeks were at, and we’re still at it. They asked all of the big questions and we haven’t answered any of them yet. We’re still having that same conversation with ourselves: how to be human, what is civilised society, how should we treat each other.

“And then there’s the law, telling us all what to do. And we have to obey that, because otherwise we’ll end up in prison. Generally, it’s not because we believe in law. And yet I do think we come with a sense of good and evil, right and wrong, and a natural sense of justice within us all. But very often that’s at odds with the constitution, or with what we’re told to do.”

Hester Swane is one of many Carr characters who refuse to do what they’re told, and who thus finds themselves at odds with the consensus view of the community.

“You can behave in the most obnoxious fashion as long as you’re perceived to be a good upstanding citizen,” Carr points out. “But I’d always be on the side of the outsiders, the scapegoats, the tortured ones. There’s a different rhythm going on in them, a different sense of what’s right and true. They’re pure in heart and soul, I suppose, in some really demented way. And I’m trying to get at that.”

By the Bog of Cats runs at the Abbey until Sep 12