Theatre Review - By the Bog of Cats

Abbey Theatre, Dublin

Marina Carr’s much admired play centres on Hester Swane (Susan Lynch), a wild misfit woman living on the boglands on the edge of a small midlands town.

Already alienated from a community festering with hypocrisy, brutality, and perversion, Hester is pushed over the edge when she is discarded by the love of her life and father to her child, Carthage Kilbride (Barry O’Connor). On the day when he is set to marry another woman, Hester decides that there will be hell to pay, and, with its heady blend of Greek tragedy, country shtick, and gothic aesthetics, the production doesn’t short-change us. Hell is paid up in full.

Director Selina Cartmell, as ever, invests in strong visuals and, Monica Frawley’s set and costume design is wonderfully evocative. Bare, white, hard and brittle, the stage captures the “cold white world” of Carr’s imagining while at the same time infusing events with a mythic grandeur. The additional use of audio-visual inserts is distracting and distancing, however, adding further brushstrokes to a play that doesn’t require them.

Hopped up on her own loss and torment, Lynch’s Hester is a fierce and febrile hive of emotions. She has a preternatural purity of spirit, but she is also a black pit of every hard and hurtful human thing. Like many of Carr’s tragic heroines, she is perhaps too aware of her own sufferings, failings, and tragic fate, and the constant articulation of her anguish does close down the character a little for the audience.

The character’s scars would perhaps gain additional power if they were less verbalised. Nevertheless, Lynch does well to capture stray moments where Hester — usually when in the company of her young daughter — seems capable of aligning herself with life instead of with death.

Carr’s poetic idiom and way with comic dialogue is vividly rendered and all of the performances are top-grade. Marion O’Dwyer steals the show, however, with her deliciously vile character, the hideously bitter Mrs Kilbride.

Until September 12.