Posts Tagged ‘Marina Carr’

Woman and Scarecrow, one of Irish playwright Marina Carr’s most recent plays, despite not being set anywhere in particular, addresses issues that are familiar to the Irish stage. While she takes a step away from the midlands of Ireland of previous plays like By the Bog of Cats and Portia Coughlan, she revisits themes and issues from these plays and develops them in a new way. Woman and Scarecrow, like numerous of Carr’s other plays, deals with issues and ideas surrounding death and the realm of the dead, the play revolving around the central character of ‘Woman’ who lingers precariously between the realms of the living and the dead, assessing and commenting upon her life from her sick bed. It plays with the boundaries of reality and fantasy or myth, the mythic realm of the dead and the undead, of ghosts and spirits.
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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.
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