As the latest run of the famous By The Bog of Cats comes to an end at the Abbey Theatre, playwright and UCD alumnus Marina Carr speaks to Patrick Kelleher about what inspires her writing, and discusses power and oppression in modern society.
Talking to playwright Marina Carr is a somewhat intimidating experience. Heralded as one of Ireland’s greatest living playwrights, she has written an extensively performed and critiqued body of plays. Amongst these is the famous By The Bog of Cats, which has just come to the end of a run in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where it debuted in 1998.
By The Bog of Cats is a chilling play that focuses on one day in the life of Hester Swane. Above all else, the play is an intense character study. Hester Swane is central to everything that happens. Her actions, her wisdom, and her ability to both love and hate those around her is central. At the core of this is Carr’s chilling, yet often heartwarming depiction of the mother and daughter relationship, which she says she is keen to get across.
“Well I just think it’s a huge part of the equation and it’s pretty much left out,” she says. “Usually it’s fathers and sons, or you have the great coming-of-age stories for young men. The great literature, you have it in Joyce, in a very absorbed sort of way you have it in Beckett, you have it in a lot of fiction, and a lot of literature, and you have the great male mind at work… It doesn’t seem as though there has been as much light shone on the psychology of women, and I find that very interesting to explore that, and also I find it very interesting that it continues to be an addendum, despite the fact that we’re supposed to be post Hedda Gabler and post A Doll’s House.”
The ideas of conflict and the opposing intuitions of good and evil are something that Carr is particularly interested in conveying in her characters. This shines through in many of her works, and notably Hester in By The Bog of Cats. “I mean before we had the great institutions who took care of that for us, but now we’re kind of down to I suppose what Yeats would call personal virtue,” she explains. “We don’t have the Church deciding for us what’s right or wrong or good and bad. So it’s become a very private thing, all of one’s behaviour, how one conducts oneself in the world. I suppose I do believe we are all born with an innate sense of right and wrong.”
At the core of her character-driven plays is a refusal to shy away from issues that perhaps many theatre-goers would rather not confront. Morality in writing, however, is problematic for Carr. “Well I come across it a lot… because you write, you write characters who are maybe morally questionable. They [the viewers] can confuse the writer with the character or the writer with the play… I suppose your job as a writer is you have to attempt to see all sides, however incompletely or however badly or however you fail to do that, but the attempt I suppose has to be had and the moral hat cannot be on when you’re writing because it’s a killer.”
There is a sense with which Carr is trying to expose an undercurrent in society of self-indulgence. “Most societies are based on lies, and the upholding of those lies,” she says. While casting a critical eye on this inherently untruthful society is something she considers important, she says it is not central to her writing. “I don’t think I’ve ever sat down to write a play to try and prove a moral point, to examine a strata of society. I always start with characters. I start with the heart, what people feel, and what they do. And they’re really my two compasses, and whatever comes out of that ends up as the play.”
What comes across most strongly from OTwo’s conversation with Carr is that she has a deeply entrenched discomfort with living in a society that shies away from truth. She references the “denial” surrounding sexual abuse in Ireland. Is the trend in modern Irish writing of dealing with these aspects of the past a part of the process of recovery, or a way to deal with the past?
“Well, one would wish,” she says. “But there are a lot of blinkers still on out there, a lot of denial, a lot of terror around it. And guilt, I presume. I think we all carry a bit of that guilt as well. One of the greatest myths is the protection of the child and the child is sacrosanct. Well I mean this country has proved that that is not the case. They’re the first to suffer when the chips are down, as our history brutally shows. And as all history of violence shows, children are in the front line. And after that it’s the women, and after that it’s the young men.”
Carr feels strongly that power is inherently corrupting. “The sense of being removed from the quotidian, removed from humanity,” she says. “That you have this sense of entitlement, that I find really shocking and repulsive. That you believe you have more of a right to walk the earth than someone else, it’s just deeply disturbing.”
It is perhaps this abhorration of corruption and mistrust of power that draws Carr to explore such dark themes in her plays. One of her major inspirations is Greek myth, which she says she has been reading since she was a child. “The stories are so incredible. They’re so huge, the canvas is huge and the passion is so huge, and the complexity of the characters I suppose is what attracts me,” she says.
“Even the literature, even the drama, these playwrights were absolutely humanist and feminist in the way they tackled these huge subjects. It seemed that there was more attention focused on the feminine principle… They’re just fantastic stories, they’re epic, huge. Life should be huge, you only have one. And we tend to live very tightly and very confined and not to think big and to not to allow certain thoughts. They’ve got all of that down.”
OTwo’s conversation with Carr ends on the idea of attaining freedom, and living one’s life to the full. There is the sense that Carr has one central goal in her writing in that she wants to bring otherwise unrepresented characters to life. She aims to enliven characters that have not been written about before, because she recognises the societal impulse to keep them in positions of powerlessness. Perhaps this is the closest readers can ever get to understanding the impulse behind the work of Marina Carr, a playwright who is determined to get to the root of inhumanity.
Advertisements