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.

Central to these themes is the idea of liminality and an in between place, the threshold between two spheres or states of being. 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 culture and society in question’[1], as is suggested by Melissa Sihra. While some might suggest that Carr simply revisits idioms and settings of Irish culture previously established by Yeats, Gregory and Synge, it is possible to argue that by returning to these images, Carr subverts and scrutinises them, forcing us to question what it is that ‘Irish-ness’ means today. Carr asserts, ‘The incredible bravery the writer must have, is the courage to sit down and face the ghosts and have conversations with them […] going over to the other side and coming back with something new, hopefully: gold, possibly’.[2]

Deeply ingrained in the Irish imagination and in the idea of ‘Irish-ness’ are notions of story-telling, balladry, oral tradition and the importance of talk. The Irish imagination is considered a lyrical and poetic one, stemming from the highly intellectual and mythical language used by Yeats in his quest to invent a new, classical, heroic Ireland. Irish theatre is often accused of being all talk and no action, a poet or playwright’s theatre as opposed to a theatre open to interpretations by directors and actors. It is a theatre plagued and permeated by ideas of ghosts and ghouls, spirits and the dead and undead. Stemming from the nationalist cause and the fight against English colonialism and the loss of life, there is constant reference to those who are absent, those that have been lost. There is the suggestion that Irish theatre is haunted, as Beckett wrote, ‘the dead are everywhere’[3], and that death, rather than being the end, is simply just another realm, an ontological reality to the Irish, who in a sense possess a certain duality of sensibility. The dead, as a powerful realm in Irish literature, connects us strongly and intrinsically with the past. Perhaps it is this connection with the past that leads to the suggestion of Irish theatre being stuck in the past, still hanging on to images of Irish-ness that were merely developed in order to represent an identity separate from that imposed by British administration. Almost a century on, Carr is accused of playing into these old ideas, still exploring the same themes.

Carr’s plays are saturated with images of death and spirits and Woman and Scarecrow is no exception. The very premise and plot of the play surrounds one woman’s cross over into death as we follow her through the last moments of her life. As Roisin O’Gorman asserts, ‘Woman and Scarecrow develops many of Carr’s previous themes and obsessions…the mythic and the mundane, and, of course, how it is that we die’.[4] Carr has in fact discussed at length her interest in the process of death and her ideas of what death essentially means. She says, ‘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’.[5] She later suggests that seeing the arc of a life portrayed on stage, and the completion of that life is the most beautiful of all things and this is exactly what we are seeing enacted in Woman and Scarecrow. On her deathbed, Woman reflects and rages on the life that she has led. She has given birth to eight children, and had a hopeless marriage with a hopeless husband.

She is accompanied through the long drawn out process of death by her friend and companion, the mysterious and indefinable Scarecrow. Lisa Hunt describes how the character of Scarecrow is never explained by Carr; ‘You are never sure if she is a morphine-induced alter-ego, an internal voice, or some sort of guardian angel’.[6] She intercedes on the register between the living and the dead, acting sometimes as friend and confidant to Woman and other times as death or judge. Tanya Dean, writing in Irish Theatre Magazine, describes the Dublin production in which Scarecrow was played by Barbara Brennan; ‘Resplendent in over-sized sunglasses, and a gown and coat that call to mind the shading and slight oleaginous quality of woven crow’s feathers’.[7] This representation of Scarecrow is illustrative of Carr’s use of heightened realism. We are never sure whether Scarecrow is human or non-human, dead or alive. She is a liminal body walking a tightrope between the spheres of the real and unreal. In a sense, the character of scarecrow is similar to characters from Carr’s other plays, such as Catwoman and the ghost fancier from By the Bog of Cats. By the Bog of Cats is, similarly to Woman and Scarecrow, full of imagery and reference to death, even in its very setting. As Sihra writes; ‘the ghosts in this play are a part of the purgatorial world of the bog…the ancient landscape of the bog makes up this realm, which is the threshold between the living and the dead, the natural and the unnatural’.[8] It is significant that the both the figures of Catwoman and the ghostfancier appear mostly on the bog, as they are both essentially liminal characters. Sihra observes Catwoman as a ‘chronic figure who….hovers between the landscapes of the living and the dead…Half woman, half animal…inhabiting a liminal territory between the realms of the supernatural and the everyday’.[9] The character of the ghostfancier is so significant, not simply because he lingers between realms, but also because he draws attention to the liminality of Hester’s position. His comment that ‘where there’s ghosts, there’s ghostfanciers’[10] indicates how close she is to entering the realm of death and is reminiscent of Hester’s later confession to her brother that she has already been feeling like a ghost for a long while. This idea of being on a precipice between two different realms or worlds corresponds with Fiona Macintosh’s definition of the tragic character, as cited by Sihra.

‘It is the conception of death as a process that makes death and dying a part of the processes of living […] it is also this conception that brings the dead themselves into the world of the living’.[11]

The idea of liminality permeates all of Carr’s work to date. The limen is defined by Victor Turner, in The Ritual Process,as ‘a threshold or sill, a thin strip neither inside nor outside a room, linking one space to another, a passageway between places rather than a place in itself’[12]. Melissa Sihra describes how ‘Potent threshold spaces such as windows and doorways emphsize issues of containment and transformation in performance, reinforcing the place of the body with history and cultural. The limen of the window powerfully frames the emptiness that it outlines on stage’.[13] Woman and Scarecrow is drenched in images of liminality. While the woman herself is an essentially liminal symbol, other sites include the wardrobe in which lurks the strange figure or force of death. We can hear it moving and banging behind the door, the wardrobe door being all that separates the world of the living and the dead. Another site is the door to the living room, in which the living reside, the impatient vultures such as Auntie Ah hovering impatiently, obsessed with laying out the dead and steeped in curiosity, a very Irish image. The contrast between the spaces of the living and the dying were juxtaposed effectively in the production at the Peacock in Dublin. Each time someone entered or exited from the room, a warm yellow light could be seen emanating from the kitchen/living room. Yellow being a colour typically connoting warmth and contentment, it marked a stark contrast with the blue light that spilled into Woman’s room in her dying moments and with the harshness and coldness of the snow covered stage and frost tinted windows. The image of the window is one that recurs in other plays by Carr such as The Mai in which a huge bay window serves as the backdrop for the play and could be seen as representing an external world that women cannot enter as they are confined to the private sphere.

Woman has also been clearly defined by the public sphere having been mother to eight children. Her tumultuous relationship with Man is reminiscent of other relationships fraught with anxiety in Carr’s work. In fact, the relationship between Man and Woman in Woman and Scarecrow is extremely similar to that between Tilly and Tomred in Ulalloo, one of Carr’s early plays. Similarly to Woman, Tilly is confined to bed and eventually dies. During the course of the play we see the complexity of feeling shared between the two characters. In the same way as Man and Woman, they speak to each other but are completely unable to connect. In Low and the Dark, the strange character of Curtains laments the state of her marriage, saying, ‘When we spoke, and it wasn’t often, we spoke mostly of the landscape…we lay there side by side, like two corpses, horrified at our immobility…No passion there.’ Reminiscent of this description and of Tilly and Tomred’s failure to connect is the exchange between Man and Woman towards the end of the play. Man says, ‘So what were the last three decades about?’ and Woman answers ‘You and I? They were exile of course…exile from the best of ourselves’.[14]

Thus we see that Carr not only draws on themes and ideas she has previously explored but from the theatre of Yeats and Synge, from the old folklore and myths of ‘real’ Ireland. Clare Wallace describes in her essay entitled ‘Authentic Reproductions’, how, in dealing with these themes that are considered so typically Irish, playwrights have found international success. It seems that in contemporary consumer culture, one must have something to sell and it has become apparent that an ‘Irish-spin’ is very marketable. Declan Hughes sees this as somewhat problematic. He says; ‘Too often when I go to the theatre, I feel like I’ve stepped into a time capsule: even plays supposed to be set in the present seem burdened by the compulsion to…well, in the narrowest sense, be Irish’.[15] It becomes apparent that Irish playwrights feel a necessity to address their history in order to assert the present. The Irish imagination it seems, is still an extremely poetic one, deeply invested in the investigation of ‘the intricate, mutually dependant processes of memory and identity.’[16] While Carr can be considered to operate within this framework and legacy, given her subject matter, it can also be suggested that she somehow subverts the ideas of nostalgia and a longing for the past through the strategies of disruption and naturalisation of the fantastic that emerge from her style of writing. ‘In terms of style, Carr’s dramas operate within a kind of ‘heightened realism’, working on mythic, densely metaphoric levels, where lyrical narratives of memory and flashback, disrupt temporal and ‘historical’ linearity, effecting s repeated discordance between subjective ‘truth’ and speculative invention.’[17] In a sense Carr’s work offers multiple possibilities and alternative viewpoints, opening up all spheres and realms of discussion, and thus proposing a new Ireland that is rooted in the past but relevant to the contemporary Ireland. As Sihra suggests:
‘Through the priviledging  of sites of myth and imagination, of lyricism and ghosts, Carr’s plays reject the aesthetic of minemis, [which] has maintained the hegemony of realism in representation; and which, as Lynda Hart observes, ‘effectively masks the ‘recreational power of minemis’ In masking the processes of its own production, the cultural politics of realism/minemis, proposes itself as an essential, almost pre- or trans-historicic reality, eliding difference and priviledging the patriarchal order. Carr’s conceptual spaces of otherness forge rooms where enactments of alterity are possible and female expressiveness can begin to take place’.[18]