Till death us do part

Mark O’Regan tells Colette Sheridan how he relishes playing a philandering husband in Marina Carr’s acclaimed play, Woman and Scarecrow

ACCORDING to actor Mark O’Regan, Woman and Scarecrow is possibly Marina Carr’s best work. O’Regan plays the husband (called Him) of a dying woman (known as Woman) in the play, which opens at Cork’s Everyman Theatre next Monday. Directed by Geoff Gould of Blood in the Alley Theatre Company, Woman And Scarecrow is a sometimes bitter study of impending death that inevitably leads to reflections on the life that is drawing to a close. Woman (played by Joan Sheehy) is in a bed throughout.

“The subject matter, on paper, would make you wonder how it could work,” says O’Regan. “This is about a woman in the final stages of a debilitating illness, raging against the dying light. But Marina brilliantly introduces an alter ego (Scarecrow, played by Noelle Brown) who is not unlike Gar Private in Philadelphia Here I Come. Scarecrow chastises and criticises Woman, who hasn’t fulfilled her potential.”