At the interval of ‘Marble’, the Marina Carr play currently premiering at The Abbey, the woman next to me couldn’t take it anymore. She’d escaped to the foyer, read the last page of the play, and then made the decision that she wouldn’t waste anymore of her short life on this nonsense. In a way, that’s exactly how the female characters in Carr’s play feel.
Despite my general soft spot for the work of Ireland’s most prolific female playwright, I could empathize with this disgruntled audience member. Like most of Carr’s work ‘Marble’- directed by Jeremy Herrin- deals with issues and ideas surrounding death and the realm of the dead, not exactly upbeat subject matter.
‘Marble’ further develops many of Carr’s previous themes and obsessions- the mythic and the mundane, and, of course, how it is that we die. Carr has in fact discussed at length her interest in the process of death and her ideas of what death essentially means. She tells Melissa Sihra,the foremost scholar on the playwright’s work, ‘We are of time, but also beyond it…The fact that we are dying probably is the only significant thing for all of us. And how we live, and how we die…I have always thought that death is just a moment, like two seconds. It is just the end of your world here. It is almost like the starting block of the race’.
Essentially a play about dreams, the narrative surrounds two couples- Catherine and Ben, Anne and Art- both have kids, both are happy. Thing are disrupted however when Catherine and Art start having erotic dreams about one another, set in a marble room, with marble windows. As the line between real life and the dream world blurs, jealousy grips and life for Ben and Catherine, and for Art and Anne begins to unravel. Catherine can no longer bear to live in the living, mortal world, full of supermarkets, restaurants and wine bars. Cynical and disgusted with life she is simply waiting for it all to end.
Central to these themes is the idea of liminality and an in between place, the threshold between two spheres or states of being- dreams and reality, death and life, mortality and immortality. Employing a sort of heightened hyper-realistic style in her exploration of these themes and ideas, Carr places her audience at a critical distance from the work, offering an oblique access to the world of the characters. Catherine explains: “It’s as if my real life is happening when I go to sleep and you and I are a dream, a fragment, difficult to remember on waking. Being awake is no longer important”.
As in Carr’s other plays, the women are wild and unconventional (unlike the men, who are basically talking props. The striking difference in ‘Marble’ however, is that this isn’t the typical midlands backdrop regularly employed by Carr, but a much more contemporary Ireland. Revisiting themes and issues from previous plays and developing them in a new way, the set is indicative of a ‘yuppy’ apartment by the docks where the furniture is retro-chic and wreaks of ‘Habitat’. These issues of displacement and anomie suddenly feel all the more unsettling when juxtaposed against this aesthetic backdrop. The absence of the rural landscape is not lost on Carr’s characters: Catherine references ‘rural, open parts of the country that are really just asylums.’
While the play boasts a general sense of taught humor, I found these self-reflexive references to previous works much more amusing than the gags surrounding the battle of the sexes. Another example of these references was when Carr’s themes of incest were parodied by Anne’s reading of a book she described as being about ‘tasteful incest’.
Special mention must be made of the set design by Robert Innes Hopkins, which, in addition to the retro-chic apartment vibe, included a huge marble column that stretched up majestically out of the audience’s line of vision. In the final scene of the show the column emerges from the theatre floor, leaving a gaping crater reminiscent of a tomb or even the gateway to hell, droplets of filthy water sliding down into darkness. Smooth transitions were made possible by remote control, sofas sliding efficiently into place without the help of stage hands.
If there was one thing I took from this play, it was a greater respect for life and a sense of human mortality of which Marina Carr has always been acutely aware. Some might emerge from The Abbey wanting to make the most of every second, climb the Himalayas, sail down the Mississippi on a home made raft. Then again, if you don’t fancy going skydiving, ‘I know it’s not living on the edge but then, there’s not room on the edge for everyone’.