Heather Sell

Allison Campbell

THE 390

10 December 2011

Where in the world is Marina Carr? : Ireland and Marina Carr

Marina Carr is one of Ireland’s most famous playwrights, and who first rose to

fame during the late nineties and into the early 2000s. Many of Marina Carr’s plays take

place in Midlands Ireland, a place Carr knows well, as it is where she grew up. According

to the book Irish women writers: an A-to-Z guide, “Her first play Ullalo (1991), was

written at UCD [University College Dublin], though not performed at the Peacock until

more than three years later and two years after Low in the Dark.”1 Furthermore, Carr’s

work bears many similarities to the work of her predecessors (Beckett, Yeats, Lady

Gregory) and yet her work is oddly contemporary, set in a world that is isolated from and

yet very similar to our own. This paper will address the themes of Carr’s work, how her

work is similar to her fellow playwrights, past and present. In particular, I will focus on

how Carr uses the theme of the grotesque in her two plays Portia Coughlan and By the

Bog of Cats at lenght. The paper will also look at articles about how other productions

have been staged and what critics and reviewers thought of some of these productions.

1 Gonzalez, A. G. (2006). Irish women writers: an a-to-z guide. London: Greenwrood Press. Page 62

First, before I go into the themes of Carr’s work, I think it is important that we

learn a little about who Marina Carr is, where she grew up, and what her childhood was

like:

Carr grew up in Gortnamona, near Tullamore, and Pallas Lake, County Offaly.

She attended Sacred Heart School in Tullamore. While Carr was growing up, her

mother was the principal in a national school, and her father, Hugh Carr, wrote

novels and plays, including ones staged at the Abbey, Peacock, and Gate theaters

in Dublin. Carr was the second oldest of six children. Her mother, who also wrote

poetry, died when the playwright was seventeen. Carr attended University College

Dublin, where she read philosophy and English and participated in the Drama

Society, as both an actress and a writer.2

From the quote above, we can see that Carr grew up in a household where the arts and

expression were encouraged. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Carr followed

her father’s footsteps and became a playwright. As mentioned in the introduction, Carr’s

two plays Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats both use elements of the grotesque.

In her article “Ireland’s ‘exiled’ women playwrights: Teresa Deevy and Marina Carr,”

Cathy Leeney discusses the themes of alienation and exile and how they relate to the

work of both playwrights. While reading Carr’s By the Bog of Cats, I, too, was struck by

themes of grotesqueness as well as themes of alienation and exile. I wish to explore both

of those themes in more detail, especially how Carr’s two plays—Portia Coughlan, and

By the Bog of Cats—use these themes of the grotesque and alienation respectively. As an

2 Gonzalez, page 61-62

active reader of Carr’s work, I feel that exploring her work only for alienation or only for

the grotesqueness of her work will not do justice to a text that is so rich and layered with

symbolism. To read the play with only one of these things in mind is to miss the forest

for the trees—it would be catastrophic—like imagining the play without Hester’s

interactions with the fascinating Catwoman, or without the dead swan that ties Hester to

the bog forever. Here, my ultimate goal is to show how Carr uses the Irish landscape,

Greek tragedy, and constantly refers to earlier Irish playwrights to create a three-way

marriage between the grotesque, the past, and modern Ireland.

As mentioned, the grotesque is a prominent theme in Carr’s plays Portia

Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, grotesque

means, as an observation, “Of landscape: Romantic, picturesquely irregular”3. Both of

these plays give the audience female heroines who neither forgive nor ask permission for

what they do. Rather, they enter the theater as if they own it, demanding what they think

is rightfully theirs. Furthermore, the opening line of By the Bog of Cats is Hester

demanding to know “Who are you? Haven’t seen you around here before”4. Such a

statement is evocative, and the scene only gets more haunting from there, with the

mysterious person’s declaration “I’m a ghost fancier” and the revelation later that he is

looking for Hester herself. Likewise, with Portia Coughlan, the opening stage directions

are also evocative, albeit for different reasons:

Two isolating lights up. One on Portia Coughlan in her living room. She wears a

nightdress and a sweatshirt. Disheveled and barefoot, she stands, staring forward,

3 OED, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/81794?rskey=aj3p0D&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid25403634 Carr, 265

a drink in her hand; curtains closed. The other light comes up simultaneously on

Gabriel Scully, her dead twin. He stands at the bank of the Belmont River,

singing. They mirror one another’s posture and movements in an odd way;

unconsciously. Portia stands there, drinking lost-looking, listening to Gabriel’s

voice.5

As is evident by the stage directions, the play, By the Bog of Cats, is ridden with ghosts

and skeletons. I think it is safe to say that if Gabriel’s death were not an important part of

the plot—or if how he died did not affect Portia’s life in a remarkable way—his character

would have been demoted to a simple footnote. From the start of the play—just as she did

with By the Bog of Cats, Carr prepares the audience to embark on a journey of the

grotesque. Furthermore, with Portia Coughlan, Carr gives the audience a very different,

yet still assertive character. The first two lines of the play, delivered by her husband

Raphael, tell us a lot about her character: “Ah for fuck’s sake. Ten O’clock in the mornin’

and you’re at it already [drinking]”6. Like Hester, Portia cannot get over the absence of a

loved one, and returns throughout the play to the Belmont River, hoping and waiting for

him to return, even though she knows he is dead. Likewise, Hester Swane spends her

entire life waiting for her mother to return: “And I watched her walk away from me

across the Bog of Cats. And across the Bog of Cats I’ll watch her return.”7 Both Hester

and Portia are only reunited with their loved ones through death. Hester’s death, unlike

Portia’s, is foreshadowed at the beginning of the play. In a sense, the ghost fancier’s

presence acts as a prologue that catapults the characters into action and lets us know why

5 Carr, 1936 Carr, 1937 Carr, 297

Hester chooses this day of all days to act. There are many reasons why Hester would

choose this day to “go off the deep end”. Her former lover, Carthage Kilbride is getting

married that day to Caroline Cassidy, a girl Hester used to babysit. Another more

uncanny reason, relates to old Black Wing, the black swan we see Hester dragging at the

beginning of the play. Apparently, Hester’s mother told Catwoman “That child will live

as long as this swan, not a day more, not a day less.”8 Since the audience sawHester

dragging the corpse of Old Black Wing at the top of the show, it is clear that by the end

of the show either someone will kill Hester or she will take her own life. Matters are

complicated even more by the fact that the ghost fancier appeared, mistook dawn for

dusk, and thus claimed that he was “too previous.”9

As mentioned previously, my goal with this paper is to prove not only that Carr uses

the grotesque extremely well, but also that she borrows from past Irish playwrights. In his

article “Talking with Ghosts of Irish Playwrights Past: Marina Carr’s By the Bog of

Cats,” Richard Russell discusses how Carr has been influenced by her predecessors.

Russell addresses how the ghosts of the play are not the only ghosts present in the text,

and that the play has “the ghostly presence of Irish dramatists from the past, whose work

Carr has heavily drawn on, yet modified-suggests how best to understand the

comparative dramatic context of the play”.10 Concerning chapter 11, “The Book of the

Dead,” in Homer’s Odyssesy, Carr has this to say:

Homer talking about writing and how to gain access to hidden knowledge, to the

past, to the dead, to that other world. And what he seems to be saying is you must 8 Carr, 2759 Carr, 26710 Russell, Richard. "Talking with Ghosts of Irish Playwrights: Marina Carr's By the Bog if Cats." Comparative Drama. 40.2 (Summer 2006): ppp-pp 149-168. Print.

give blood, blood being the sacrifice demanded for the tongues or the ear of the

dead. [These passages from Homer demonstrate] incredible bravery on the part of

the writer. It’s about the courage to sit down and face the ghosts and have a

conversation with them. It’s about going over to the other side and coming back

with something, new, hopefully; gold, possibly.11

Carr’s thoughts on Homer’s Odyssey suggest that the author has a keen sense of how

death works—and how it shouldn’t work. Her characters often cling to death for a little

too long, and as is often the case, take more than skeletons with them to their graves.

They take their skeletons, other people, and grievances with them: Hester kills her own

daughter before the ghost fancier arrives and the two enter into a “dance of death”.12

Furthermore, Russell’s article mentions Yeats’s belief that language should be at the

center of his plays: “I wanted to get rid of irrelevant movement, the stage must become

still that words might keep all their vividness, and I wanted vivid words.”13 The

playwrights Lady Augusta Gregory and John Millington Synge also shared Yeats’s belief

that language was more important than movement. Moreover, Russell cites Hester’s

disdain, in act 1, scene 5, for the contract she has signed that gives her house and property

over to her former love, Carthage Kilbride, and his fiancé, Carolina Cassidy: “Bits of

writin’, means nothin’, can as aisy be unsigned."14 In a way, Carr has taken their advice

to heart, and uses movement only at key points in the text: Hester dragging the dead

swan, and the dance of death. Furthermore, language, especially in plays of Irish descent

and content, should have language at their heart, given that the dialect and language of

11 Marina Carr, quoted in Richard Russell, 15012 Carr, 339-34113 Willliam Butler Yeats, quoted in Richard Russell, 15114 Marina Carr, cited in Richard Russell, 154

the Irish is a rich one. Both Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats are written with a

midlands Irish accent in mind. On the character personae page for Portia Coughlan,

Marina Carr writes that the accent is “Midland. I’ve given some flavor in the text, but the

Midland accent is more rebellious than the written word permits.”15 Carr does something

similar for By the Bog of Cats: “I’ve given a slight flavor in the text, but the real Midland

accent is a lot flatter and rougher and more guttural than the written word allows.”16

In their article “Performing Ireland: new perspectives on contemporary Irish

theater,” Brian Singleton and Anna McMullan address the ever devolving Irish theater

scene. According to the article, “The phenomenal rise in arts funding in the past ten years

in the Republic of Ireland has been a symptom of a booming economy which began

roughly in 1993.”17 The article went on to discuss how the economic boom of the nineties

led to an increase of funding in the theater. I mention this because Carr’s play By the Bog

of Cats had its world premiere at the Abbey Theater as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival

on October 7, 1998. The play premiered during a time of economic security, and yet, her

characters are so far removed from the world in which Carr wrote the play. In that regard,

Marina Carr occupies an interesting place in contemporary theater in the sense that her

work is more tied to the past than it is to the present. Many of her plays take elements of

past Irish playwrights, reference or rewrite Greek tragedies in modern times. While the

setting of her plays is indeed “the present,”18 her characters constantly put more stake in

the past and its implications on their lives than they do on the present. Case in point,

15 Carr, 19116 Carr, 26117 Singleton, Brian, and Anna mcMullan. "Performing Ireland: new perspectives on contemporary Irish theater." Australasian Drama Studies. .43 (Oct 2003): ppp-pp 3-15. Print.18 Carr, 191 and 261 respectively

Portia cannot get over the death of her twin brother Gabriel, and we later find out that

they had planned to commit suicide together in the Belmont River, but she backed out at

the last minute. Likewise, Hester is haunted by what Catwoman calls a “fierce wrong […]

that’s caught up with ya,”19 which we later find out is the murder of Joseph Swane, her

long lost brother. In a sense, Portia and Hester invent shadows—they live in dark worlds

of their own mind and give no mind to the world that continues to turn around them,

regardless of the consequences. The consequences of these invented shadows, or, rather,

living in the past, is Portia’s eventual suicide in Act two and Hester’s sacrificial murder

of her daughter Josie and her subsequent dance of death with the ghost fancier.

The stake that Hester and Portia put in the past, and the extent to which they go to

remain in the past, or to drag other characters down with them, is reminiscent of the

grotesque. In Portia Coughlan, we see a character haunted by the death and yet there is

no blood on her hands as there was with Hester’s murder of Joseph Swane, since Gabriel

drowned. Usually, with drowning, a person struggles to breathe and stay above water—

Hester cut Joseph’s throat and had to wash the blood off of her hands. Portia, on the other

hand, had to live with the guilt that she had backed out of their pact, and that there was no

concrete evidence that she had had any part in Gabriel’s demise, just a notion hanging

over her head that she had indeed played a part in his death. Portia’s real challenge is

living with herself after the death of her twin, which, ultimately, ends up being

impossible. In the play, the element of the grotesque comes not only from the bloodless

death of Gabriel, but from the closeness of the twins:

19 Carr, 274

Came out of the womb holding hands—When God was handing’ out souls he

must’ve got mine and Gabriel’s mixed up, aither that or he gave us just the one

between us and it went into the Belmont River with him—Oh, Gabriel, ya had no

right to discard me so, to float me on the world as if I were a ball of flotsam. Ya

had no right.20

In the quote above, Portia discusses the closeness of herself and Gabriel in grotesque

terms—so much so that it should come as no surprise that the two of them had a sexual

relationship. In a way, Carr sets this up was a precursor to that revelation, as if she as

playwright is preparing the audience for that discovery and sets up part of its history.

Moreover, Carr later reveals that Portia’s parents are brother and sister, so the sexual

relationship of Portia and Gabriel comes off as destiny. The two of them come from

incest and then go out of this world through incest: Gabriel sees Portia with another man

and becomes guilty, and the suicide pact comes about. The grotesque in this play comes

more from a mixture from the landscape and the family history. On the other hand, the

grotesqueness in By the Bog of Cats seems to stem from the landscape of the bog, which

is easily enacted upon. In Portia’s world, the Belmont River is a landscape that both gives

life and takes it away—the habitation surrounding the river receives nourishment from

the river’s water and the river ultimately takes the life of Gabriel and Portia respectively.

However, the deaths of these two characters are far from accidental: Gabriel’s death

fifteen years before the play takes place was suicide, just as Portia’s death on her thirtieth

birthday is suicide as well.

20 Carr, 211

The third part of the “three-way marriage” I mentioned in the opening paragraph

is Carr’s link to Greek tragedy. Carr’s play By the Bog of Cats is a modern day portrayal

of Euripides’s Medea. In the original tragedy, Medea is a lover who is ousted and

exchanged for a new, younger lover. Medea, like Hester, refuses to accept her alienation.

Medea poisons a dress and jewels, which she has her children deliver to the princess, who

is to be married to Medea’s former lover, Jason, that day. The difference between the

two plays is that the action of Medea takes place off-stage and is described through

dialogue. Carr uses the grotesque nature of the tragedy of Medea to enhance her play.

The opening image of Hester dragging the swan, Hester showing up at the wedding, and

the sacrificial killing of Josie and subsequent dance of death all occur on stage. The only

action not to occur on stage is the burning of the house, farm, and the cattle. However, we

see the aftermath and the havoc that ensues and I think it is safe to say that it is this that

causes the themes of the play to come full circle. Carr’s other play, Portia Coughlan,

while not a direct translation of a Greek tragedy, certainly has elements of tragedy in it.

One could certainly consider Portia Coughlan to be a tragic hero, but a modern day tragic

hero with several deathly flaws, some of them perhaps more fatal than others. The main

flaw, of course, is that she is haunted by her twin brother’s death and the fact that she did

not follow through with their planned suicide.

Now that I have gone over the grotesque themes of Marina Carr’s plays By the

Bog of Cats and Portia Coughlan, I will discuss where her works have been produced.

Carr’s work was recently seen at Villanova University. According to an article from

Stage Magazine, about a recent production of Carr’s work at Villanova, Woman and

Scarecrow, the university has recently begun a relationship with the Abbey Theater:

Villanova University’s highly respected Theatre Department is beginning an

exchange program with Ireland’s celebrated Abbey Theatre; the two institutions

will be working together to further enrich their artistic and intellectual traditions. 

Students from Villanova will be afforded the opportunity to study with the Abbey

in Dublin and artists from there will spend time at the University. There will be

lectures, workshops and community conversations as the University offers a

“home away from home” for the Abbey. The inaugural event in this exchange is

the Theatre’s production of Marina Carr’s WOMAN AND SCARECROW,

onstage at Vasey Hall November 8th thru the 20th.21

In that same article, the writer mentions, “Death—and dying; the Irish (and I am one)

seem to be obsessed with this topic. Don’t know why this is, but it is a subject oft

explored in the theatre of my heritage.”22 Furthermore, Marina Carr has had seventeen

premiers at the Abbey Theater:

Marble is Marina’s seventh premiere at the Abbey. Previous plays first performed

here are Ullaloo, The Mai, Portia Coughlan, By the Bog of Cats, Ariel and Meat

and Salt. Other plays include On Raftery’s Hill (Druid/Royal Court), Low in the

Dark (Project Arts Centre), Woman and Scarecrow (Royal Court), The Cordelia

Dream (RSC) and The Giant Blue Hand (The Ark). Awards include The

Macaulay Fellowship, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the E.M. Forster

Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has held the

Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova. She was the 1932 fellow at 21 http://stagepartners.org/2011/11/raging-against-the-dying-of-the-light-villanova-presents-marina-carrs-woman-and-scarecrow/22 http://stagepartners.org/2011/11/raging-against-the-dying-of-the-light-villanova-presents-marina-carrs-woman-and-scarecrow/

Princeton for 2008. She currently teaches playwriting at Trinity College Dublin

where she is an honorary professor. A member of Aosdána, Marina lives in Kerry

with her husband and four children.23

The McCarter theater in New Jersey was one of the first theaters in the United States to

put on Carr’s work:  

Phaedra Backwards is a McCarter commission, and it’s the third time one of her

plays has been staged at the theater. She and Emily Mann, McCarter’s artistic

director and the director of Phaedra’s Backwards, first met 15 years ago when Ms.

Mann saw one of Ms. Carr’s plays in London. That led to The Mai being staged in

Princeton in 1996, followed by Portia Coughlan in 1999.24

In conclusion, it is clear that Marina Carr’s plays explore elements of the

grotesque, and that her work is prominent. Her work is being produced all over the world,

with future productions coming up in the U.S. Carr was a prominent playwright during

the nineties and well into the 2000s, and fortunately for theatergoers, it doesn’t look like

she shows any desire of quitting writing.

23 http://www.abbeytheatre.ie/people/view/marina_carr/24 http://www.centraljersey.com/articles/2011/11/02/time_off/entertainment_news/doc4eb1cd9c084c6563972360.txt

Works Cited

Gonzalez, A. G. (2006). Irish women writers: an a-to-z guide. London: Greenwrood

OED, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/81794?rskey=aj3p0D&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid2540363

Russell, Richard. "Talking with Ghosts of Irish Playwrights: Marina Carr's By the Bog if Cats." Comparative Drama. 40.2 (Summer 2006): ppp-pp 149-168. Print.

Singleton, Brian, and Anna mcMullan. "Performing Ireland: new perspectives on contemporary Irish theater." Australasian Drama Studies. .43 (Oct 2003): ppp-pp 3-15. Print.