Marina Carr is an acclaimed Irish playwright known for her Midlands tragedies, which address Ireland's "shadow side" through dark family dramas set in the Irish Midlands. Her plays trace the damage done to women across generations by "unmotherly mothers" who neglect their children while focusing on destructive men. Carr was part of a generation in the 1990s that renewed Irish theater, and her plays confront issues like abuse, incest, and Ireland's culture of silence through mythical and vernacular storytelling blended with classical influences. Carr's body of work interrogates concepts of motherhood and the family within Irish patriarchy.

1. The Shadow Side of Modern Ireland: Marina Carr's Midlands
Tragedies.
Marina Carr's Midlands tragedies enter old myths from new
angles. Their dark comedy, searching lyricism, and vernacular might come
from an Irish wellspring, but they travel well beyond it.
When Marina Carr's play The Mai arrived in 1994, spanning
The generations of women across a century of Irish history, it might
have seemed a whole psychic terrain was being written back into Irish
drama. The play follows the lives of seven women from 1879 to 1979, from
one
http://marinawarehamboatyard.blog.com/2015/01/12/finding-the-best-boat-repair-marina-wareham-b
oatyard/ hundred-year-old opium-smoking Grandma Fraochlan, born thirty years
after the famine, to her great granddaughter, Millie, who narrates the
family story that is her legacy. Set on the cusp of a decade marked by
bitter generational conflict, the play opens in summer 1979. The year
Pope John Paul II gave his speech, "Young people of Ireland, I love
you." The year the ban on selling contraceptives was lifted, but
nearly two decades before the divorce ban would be. The Mai, like so
many of Carr's plays, traces family history across several
generations: thirty-year-old Millie, who represents both present and
future, is now telling the story. Clearly the story will be
different.
The Mai marked Carr's arrival into main stream Irish
theatrical tradition. Emerging in the 1990s along with Conor McPherson,
Martin McDonagh, and Enda Walsh, Carr went on to become a major
playwright in a gifted generation. The century had started with the

2. powerful definition of Irish theater brought about by Yeats and Lady
Gregory, Synge and O'Casey. It ended with overlapping waves of
renewal brought on in the 1960s by the strong emergence of Brian Friel,
Tom Murphy, and Tom Kilroy, and the even stronger emergence of
Carr's generation in the 1990s. That Carr is (as yet) the only
woman to achieve this level of recognition is grounded in the
accomplishment of her five Midlands tragedies, of which The Mai is
first. It is also the result of difficulties Irish women playwrights
faced getting their work produced in Ireland, where Carr's work is
viewed by some as the exception that proves the
http://www.purevolume.com/marinawareham/posts/9057393/Finding+the+Boat+Engine+Repair+Se
rvice+-+Marina+Wareham+Boatyard rule.
Clearing the way for Carr's achievement in the Midlands
tragedies was her early experimental work in Low in the Dark (1989),
This Love Thing (1991), and Ullaloo (1991). "My Beckett
phase," as Carr describes it, these plays probe gender boundaries
and national stereotypes by bringing insights from feminism into
absurdist-inspired styles. In Low in the Dark, women obsess about men,
men play at being women, and both fantasize about the ideal man or
woman:
BONE: I want a woman who knows how to love. I want laser beams
coming out of her eyes when I enter the room. I want her to knit like
one possessed. I want her to cook softly.
BINDER: I want a man who'll wash my underwear, one
who'll brush my hair, one who'll talk before, during and
after. I want a man who'll make other men look mean.
The set is divided into men's space, comprised of tires and

3. rims, and women's space, a "bizarre bathroom" in which a
mother indifferently bears one child after another, including the
president and the pope, while conversing with "Curtains," a
cast member concealed within burka-like drapery. Men bear children too.
The self-denying, devoted Irish mother, a recurring motif from the
national repertoire, is playfully invoked and discarded.
In her Midlands plays, Carr honed a more traditional style for
deepening her portrayal of maternal subjectivities. Written in a
guttural Midlands dialect, Carr sets the plays beside the region's
lakes, rivers, and bogs. As in earlier plays, she invokes and
renegotiates images of women from the national tradition. In The Mai,
the image of woman as maternal and woman as land are comically subverted
in the figure of Grandma Fraochlan, who takes her name from a small
island off Bofin. By caring more for her husband than her children, this
ancient mother-island, a diminutive Mother Ireland, sets in motion a
history that damages future generations of women in the play.
GRANDMA FRAOCHLAN: I know he was a useless father, Julie, I know,
and I was a useless mother. It's the way we were made! There's
two types of people in this world from what I can gather, them as puts
their children first and them as puts their lover first and for what
it's worth, the nine-fingered fisherman and meself belongs ta the
latter of these. I would gladly have hurled all seven of ye down the
slopes of hell for one night more with the nine-fingered fisherman and
may I rot eternally for such unmotherly feelin'.
As the damage cycles down the generations to Millie, unmotherly
mothers who focus on absent or destructive men to the detriment of their

4. children become part of Carr's interrogation of motherhood. In
later plays, however, her focus shifts to unfatherly fathers. "I
don't think the world should assume that we are all natural
mothers," Carr explained in a 1997 interview. "The
relationship between parent and child is so difficult and so complex.
There's every emotion there. We mostly only acknowledge the good
ones. If we were allowed to talk about the other ones, maybe it would
alleviate them in some way."
In Portia Coughlan (1996), images of menaced childhoods multiply.
Trapped in a relationship with a dead twin brother who ghosts her,
Portia is unable to love husband or child. She stops caring for her
children, fearing her own unmotherly instincts. A powerful personality
in crisis, she takes her own life, swamped by a family history of
incestuous bonds in a culture of silence. Carr combines Shakespearean
reference with Irish referents, and comic references to Greek myth with
Hollywood westerns: an eye-patch-wearing friend is the Cyclops of
Coolinarney; the set includes a bar called the High Chaparral.
In By the Bog of Cats (1998), damage originating with another
unmotherly mother drives the action. Carr weaves Greek myth and Irish
folklore into the powerful and disturbing story of Hester Swane,
abandoned as a child by her tinker mother. Based on Euripides'
Medea, the play features natural and supernatural characters: a
"ghouling" Ghost Fancier arrives too early to collect the
still-living Hester; a half-human Cat-woman eats mice, laps milk from a
saucer, and is seer and memory keeper for the community. Like Portia
Coughlan, Hester Swane takes her own life, but also the life of her

5. young daughter, Josie. Yet Hester is http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/marina never more
maternal than when she
is killing her daughter to protect her from lifelong anguish and
possible abuse at the hands of her stepgrandfather.
In the fourth Midlands tragedy, On Raftery's Hill (2000),
Carr shifts her focus to the figure of the father. In the family kitchen
of Red Raftery's rural farmhouse, three generations of women are
trapped in a cycle of abuse with a monstrous and unfatherly father.
While his daughters are abused sexually, their brother is also trapped
in the cycle of fear, living in filth in a shed built for farm animals.
The play's theme--incest, abuse and the culture of silence that
maintains them--is cast in the myth of Zeus and Hera as told by a
character with a daughter named Philomena:
ISAAC: Monsters make themselves. They were hopped into the world
clane as the next. The Grakes, however, has a different opinion of the
mahher. Zeus and the missus ... whah was her name? ... Hera. Zeus and
Hera, sure they were brother and sister and they goh married and had
chaps and young wans, and the chaps and young wans done the job wud the
mother and father and wud one another, and sure the whole loh a them was
ah ud mornin, noon and nigh. I suppose they had to populahe the world
someway. Is ud any wonder the stahe a the country and them for
ancestry.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The destruction has spread beyond the family to the farm, another
charged motif from the national repertoire, where the green fields are
now littered like ah "abattoir" with carcasses of needlessly

6. slaughtered animals. What's at stake here is not just shaking loose
tropes and motifs from earlier representations of Ireland, but
interrogating the dark side of the Irish family within the remains of
the late-twentieth-century Irish patriarchy, from which those images
descended. This play received heavy criticism for its shocking level of
physical violente (there is an implied rape in the farmhouse kitchen after the lights go down on the
first act). Yet unlike Carr's other
Midlands tragedies, no one in the family dies. As Red Raftery's
elderly mother, Shalome, informs us, "Daddys never die."
Daddys don't die on Raftery's Hill, but they do in
Carr's next play, Ariel (2002), the last of her Midlands tragedies.
Written at the height of the financial boom of the late 1990s, the play
now reads like a national allegory. On his daughter Ariel's
sixteenth birthday, Fermoy Fitzgerarld, a corrupt politician who would
be Taoiseach, makes a pact with his god that sacrifices the next
generation for the greed and ambition of the present one.
"Fermoy" is a pun on "For moi" (revising Sinn
Fein's "Ourselves Alone"). The family home is supported
by Greek columns. The family business is a cement company that profits
from paving Ireland. At play's end, Fermoy's wife, Frances,
kills him to revenge his murder of their daughter. Frances is killed by
their remaining daughter, Elaine (based on Electra) in revenge for

7. killing her father. The implication is that when
the father dies, he
takes with him not just the family but also the
current culture. Fermoy
describes to his brother, ah aging alcoholic
priest ("the last of
the Mohicans"), the pact made with the
idiosyncratic pagan god he
has fashioned:
FERMOY: I'm on this earth to rule. Was born
knowin ud.
Timidihy has held me back till now. Ud'll hould
me back no longer.
I refuse to spind any more a me life on the
margins. I refuse to succumb
to ah early exih. I'll give him whah he wants for ud's hees in
the first place anyway.
BONIFACE: And wah is ud he wants?
FERMOY: I tould ya, blood and more blood, blood till we're
dry as husks, then pound us down, spread us like salt on the land, begin
the experiment over, on different terms next time.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The plot is loosely based on another Greek myth, from
Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis. Carr's appropriation of
classical forms and themes locates her in a theatrical tradition of
Irish writers who, from the late 1960s onward, found in the classics
ways of dealing with the Troubles. Like her contemporaries, Carr uses
classical myth in the way that Adrienne Rich describes using form:

8. "as part of the strategy--like asbestos gloves" that
"allowed me to handle materials I couldn't pick up
barehanded."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
What were those materials? Arguably, Carr's Midlands
tragedies use myth to confront national violence on a domestic register
rather than a sectarian one. In her dialogue with the classics, she
explores the culpability of a society that both knows and refuses to
know its own shadow side in relation to the suffering of women and
children. To restate Seamus Heaney's configuration, Carr went in
search of myths "adequate to our predicament," turning to
Greek tragedy to the potential of figures like Medea, Iphigenia,
Electra, and Phaedra to handle this difficult material. The zeitgeist
Carr was working within becomes clearer in hindsight. Slowly forcing its
way into cultural consciousness during the decade in which she wrote the
Midlands plays was a national crisis evidenced by high-profile cases of
sexual abuse on family farms and the devastating judicial reports on
clerical abuse of children that shocked the nation a decade later. That
so many critics at the time found Carr's Midlands tragedies too
violent, too filled with acts of senseless cruelty, becomes part of the
story of her courage as an artist as well as her critical reception.
Of course, historical context doesn't account for the power
of Carr's Midlands tragedies or limit their meaning to an Irish
context. Yet Carr's revisions of figures from Greek tragedy have
become part of a wider cultural conversation about the role of art in
addressing violence, as did Heaney's revisions of Iron Age victims

9. from Danish bogs in the 1970s. Rich describes revision as "the act
of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from
a new critical direction." For women, she argues, "this is
more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival."
Carr's Midlands tragedies enter old myths from new angles. Their
dark comedy, searching lyricism, and vernacular might come from an Irish
wellspring, but they travel well beyond it.
The achievement of the Midlands tragedies would have been enough
to ensure Carr's place in the canon, but she has gone on to more,
and more varied, accomplishments. Her plays moved out of the Midlands
setting and vernacular. Woman and Scarecrow (2006), perhaps Carr's
funniest and darkest play, is set nowhere in particular. Woman, dying,
looks back on her life in conversation with Scarecrow, and in fear of
The Thing in the Wardrobe. Leaving small children and a bitter marriage
behind, she confronts the big questions relentlessly as she dies. In The
Cordelia Dream (2008), Carr takes on King Lear. A father and daughter,
both composers, vie for the inheritance in a nameless city where the
daughter has accomplished more than her father. Marble (2009) is also
based in a nameless city, against a background of affluence within a
landscape of ecological ruin. Here, Carr circles back to questions of
desire and longing raised in both her early Beckettian plays and in The
Mai. In Phaedra Backwards (2011), she returns to Greek myth with its
labyrinth of generational legacy and damaging desire, using the
hall-animal figure of the Minotaur to ask an old question from a new
angle: What makes us human?

10. Two scenes from The Mai frame one of Carr's earliest
questions into an image. The Mai's composer husband,
Robert,
missing for years, returns to her. He plays his bow
seductively across
her hips and breasts. Later, she plays herself, using the same bow. She
plays herself, using his instruments. A figure for the woman artist, the
central character is watching herself being played by her husband who is
being written by a woman playwright, who is watching them both. How a
woman artist inherits the tradition and the technique is part of the
question. How she begins to intervene in shaping it is another. By the
time we reach The Cordelia Dream, the story is different. The earlier
image has been revised. Man's daughter Woman, nine days dead,
returns to him. Woman is now the accomplished composer. Man grieves her
inheritance of tools and talent. In the darkened flat where he is dying,
Woman is neither grateful nor unloving as she places her hands on his
hands to help him play his final sonata. The new story these images are
pointing to--and the story of Carr's career to date--has been told
in the distance between them. In The Mai, the woman artist is shaped by
tradition. By the time we reach The Cordelia Dream, she's shaping
it.
Santa Barbara, California
Jody Allen Randolph served as Assistant Dean of the British
Studies at Oxford Programme at St. John's College, Oxford, and has
taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara, University
College Dublin, and Westmont College. Her Norton Critical Companion to

11. Eavan Boland was published in 2008, and Close to the Next Moment:
Interviews from a Changing Ireland appeared in 2010. Her monograph on
Eavan Boland for Bucknell University Press's Contemporary Irish
Writers Series is due out in 2012.