Marina Carr

THE STORY: Loosely based on Euripides' tragedy Medea , this is the prophetic tale of Hester Swane, an Irish Traveller, who attempts to come to terms with a lifetime of abandonment in a world where all whom she has loved have discarded her. Se

By the Bog of Cats

Hecuba

Carr s bold new play, an Abbey Theatre Dublin Theatre Festival offering and a portrait of an enigmatic artist recounted in a new plain style.

16 Possible Glimpses

Portia Coughlan

This collection of plays from Marina Carr presents a variety of themes, articulating deep-seated woes and resentments, exposing the sexism of language and religious imagery, in these original dramatic works.

Low in the Dark, The Mai, Portia Coughlan, By the Bog of Cats...

Marina Carr: Plays 1

On Raftery's Hill 'This is a play that howls to be seen; its courage is matched only by its dramatic power.' Sunday Independent Ariel 'An astonishing piece of theatre. Interweaving themes drawn from Irish, Greek and biblical myth, she spins a tale of power that is honest, emotional, dark and true . . . Die to see it.' Irish Examiner Woman and Scarecrow 'Drama doesn't come much richer or stranger than this death-bed lament. Ravishing in its dense, literary language, it is as visceral as it is intellectual. It lingers not only in the ear and brain, but in the imagination and the gut. An extraordinary brew, bittersweet and totally intoxicating.' The Times The Cordelia Dream 'A brave piece and clearly charged with deep feeling. . . This is certainly unsettling territory and Carr boldly goes for it.' Financial Times Marble 'An extraordinary play that lures us in with a promise of the recognisable only to drag us screaming into the soaring, magnificent possibilities of love and the destruction that it wreaks.' Irish Independent

Plays Two

A sinister night. Evil and edge in the air. What are they celebrating? Clytemnestra's world is torn apart when Agamemnon sacrifices their daughter for the sake of war. Ten years later, the couple are reunited. What follows is a dangerous battle fuelled by love, grief and power. Marina Carr's adaptation of the infamous Greek myth brings Clytemnestra's story to the fore and asks if it is possible to forgive the unforgivable. He turns to me in hall one evening, wine on him, sentimental. There is nothing I would not do to have your good opinion again, he says. Girl on an Altar opened at the Kiln Theatre, London, in May 2022.

Girl on an Altar

Clytemnestra's world is torn apart when Agamemnon sacrifices their daughter for the sake of war. Ten years later, the couple are reunited. What follows is a dangerous battle fuelled by love, grief and power. Marina Carr's adaptation of the infamous Greek myth brings Clytemnestra's story to the fore and asks if it is possible to forgive the unforgivable.

Haunted by her dream of Cordelia and Lear, a woman confronts an elderly man, her lifelong antagonist and rival. During their passionate altercation he dismisses her success as a composer and demands she make the ultimate sacrifice: for him to flourish she, his protégée, must be silent. Five years later, she returns for a final and devastating encounter. Marina Carr's The Cordelia Dream premiered in December 2008 at Wilton's Music Hall, London, in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The Cordelia Dream

Winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 1997. 'Carr's harrowing play has the scale and anguish of myth, and the immediacy of a contemporary anecdote.' Independent on Sunday There's a wolf tooth growin in me heart and it's turnin me from everywan and everthin I am. Portia Coughlan lives life in monstrous limbo, haunted by a yearning for her spectral twin brother lying at the bottom of the Belmont river, unable to find any love for her wealthy husband and children, seeking solace in soulless affairs, deeply afraid of what she might do. Portia Coughlan premiered on the Abbey Theatre's Peacock Stage, Dublin, in April 1996 and transferred to the Royal Court Theatre, London, in May that year. It was revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, in October 2023. 'Taut and haunting, funny and sad . . . Carr plays with time and place to resonant, ultimately devastating effect.' The Stage 'One of the most important Irish plays of the twentieth century.' Arts Review 'Marina Carr goes to a deep place that has not just to do with society now but that touches an inner tragedy of existence. The female quality of her writing comes through not only in the way she writes about women, it's in the physicality in her writing. She is right in there with the cycles of life, with the blood and the dirt.' Joyce McMillan, New York Times

A woman - gaunt and ill, haggard after giving birth eight times - faces death. What was life? What was love? What else could have been? Full of mordant, bitter humour, this is a passionate threnody from one of Ireland's leading playwrights. Woman and Scarecrow premieres at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in June 2006.

Woman and Scarecrow

I Neanderthal Prince of the Plains I saw Eden It wasn't much I saw The tree The gates Rusty But still Intact I saw The triple lock The jack boot The size of an oak I retreated Wisely God they Were Ugly Marina Carr's iGirl premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in October 2021.

iGirl

This third richly varied collection of plays by Marina Carr was published to coincide with the Royal Shakespeare Company's premiere of Hecuba at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in September 2015. Sixteen Possible Glimpses imagines sixteen fleeting moments in Anton Chekhov's short life and work. Phaedra Backwards retells the Phaedra myth to discover what shaped her. The Map of Argentina offers a meditation on love and what happens when it is denied, or pursued and hunted down. Hecuba was written in reaction to the bad press this Trojan queen receives, and reimagines how she may have suffered and reacted. Indigo is a dark and passionate romance amongst fairies, demons, ghouls and every sort of fantastic creature out of folklore and myth.

Sixteen Possible Glimpses; Phaedra Backwards; The Map of Argentina; Hecuba; Indigo

Marina Carr: Plays 3

THE STORY: An accomplished, beautiful forty-year-old woman, The Mai has always sought an exceptional life. Robert, her cellist husband, has always felt stifled by The Mai's ideals of perfection. After seventeen years he leaves her, whereupon she se

The Mai

Fermoy Fitzgerald, a politician from the Irish midlands, is a man capable of anything. He has the dreams of a conqueror. In Ariel Marina Carr attends to events surrounding his daughter s sixteenth birthday and dissects the soul of a man in thrall to powerful forces. By scratching the scars of a family s ancient skirmishes she unfolds the story of Cuura Lake. While the play embraces age-old themes power and its price, fate, the importance of remembering and of forgetting it is also the author s most contemporary work. Gorgeously cadenced, elaborately wrought, it is a score for the grand scale of her dreadful imaginings. Marina Carr is our laureate of destructive passions. Ariel signals a leap in the trajectory of this prodigiously talented writer.

Ariel

Troy has fallen. It’s the end of war and the beginning of something else. Something worse. As the cries die down after the final battle, there are reckonings to be made. Humiliated by her defeat and imprisoned by the charismatic victor Agamemnon, the great queen Hecuba must wash the blood of her buried sons from her hands and lead her daughters forward into a world they no longer recognize. Agamemnon has slaughtered his own daughter to win this war. But now another sacrifice is demanded…In a world where human instinct has been ravaged by violence, is everything as it seems in the hearts of the winners and those they have defeated?

On Raftery’s Hill; Ariel; Woman and Scarecrow; The Cordelia Dream; Marble

Marina Carr: Plays 2

THE STORY: Set on the remote hill of Raftery's farm, this play tells the tale of Red Raftery and his children, Dinah, Sorrel and Ded. Removed from the civilized world of the valley, Red lives by his own rules, where all natural order is inverted, a

On Raftery's Hill

Vronsky What were you thinking about with your head stuck to the watering can? Anna Oh, the same, always the same. I was thinking about my happiness and about my unhappiness. Russia is changing. Rules have been broken. Chaos is looming. Families are falling apart. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is an examination of a country in the midst of extraordinary change. Through the impact of one woman's decision, it looks at the troubling cost of love on the human soul. Marina Carr brings a new perspective to Anna Karenina in her stage adaptation of this epic love story, which opened at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in December 2016.

Marina Carr

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