Theatre review: Mixed results for Marina Carr's take on Sophocles' classics
A scene from The Boy, at the Abbey Theatre. Picture: Ros Kavanagh
- The Boy/The God and His Daughter
- Abbey Theatre, Dublin Theatre Festival
- ★★★☆☆
Since her earliest work, Marina Carr has mined Greek tragedy, transposing the fatalism, sex, and death in those dramas to her wild and Gothic Irish midlands. In more recent years, she’s turned the tables, putting into Hellenic mouths the blunt, colourful and strangely poetic language that she’s made her hallmark.
“You can’t tell nobody nothing,” is how a prophet complains in the first of a two-play “theatrical event” that sees Carr reworking Sophocles’s and The gods themselves, that “holy shower”, are apt to ask “Any news?”, threaten to “put manners” on the “clodhoppers”, or abruptly exclaim “I’m away,” as if just finishing a cup of tea on
It’s a rich world. Funny, earthy and deadpan, when not seething and savage, and so Irish you’re inclined to hear the word “Sidhe” instead of Shee as the name of Olwen Fouere’s oracle. But, it’s all so Greek too. We know that. Well, we know everything. There’s no hiding the plot twist here, since it’s obsessed our collective imaginations for centuries. And Carr doesn’t want to. “You know you are cursed,” is one of the first things we hear.
Carr begins unspooling the fateful destiny of her characters with the pedophile King Laius, played with a camp creepiness by Frank McCusker. He is cursed for his crimes, and, of course, in trying to avoid his fate of being killed by his son, he ensures that very outcome. He should have known that in Carr’s world, no more than Sophocles’s, mortals are helpless to unravel chains of events once they are ineluctably set in train.
The precise nature of Oedipus and Jocasta’s union is no secret, then, but Carr makes them an intriguing pair by slowly revealing just how much they themselves knew all along. Frank Blake as Oedipus and Eileen Walsh as Jocasta give fittingly epic performances, with Walsh in dynamic form as she explores Jocasta’s tortured, double-sided love, that of a mother and a wife.
It’s a shame then that, after a two-hour break, the second play feels like little more than a footnote, in which the now-blind Oedipus and Jocasta retread the same ground. Antigone, meanwhile, seems like an interloper in someone else’s tragedy, her story a detour rather than something to be invested in on its own merits.
Still, the gods continue to provide darkly and absurdist comic relief, whether that’s a deadpan Amy Conroy as the Moon, Jane Brennan as the Queen of the Furies, or Catherine Walsh as a hilarious, unhinged Sphinx.
Cordelia Chisholm’s design has a cold palatial minimalism to it, while Carl Kennedy’s string compositions remind us this is prestige theatre. Yet, seen back to back, the plays don’t quite live up to the “theatrical event” billing. It’s more of an endurance test of diminishing returns. Thankfully, the Abbey is offering the two as standalone performances too, and, as such, does very nicely.
- Until September 30
