(previously posted on keestone.livejournal.com)
So today, we got to see the newest Marina Carr play at the Abbey Theatre . . . the world premiere of Marble.
I have said this before and I'll say it again, I truly do think that
Marina Carr is the best living playwright writing in the English
language. I absolutely adore her work, and Woman and Scarecrow,
which I saw last year, is one of the most powerful theatrical
experiences I have ever had. (I think it's a photo finish between Woman and Scarecrow , Floyd Collins, and the production of Mother Courage and her Children that I saw when I was sixteen.)
Marble
is the first of Carr's plays I've seen that is urban in setting. In a way, it's
less violent than her earlier plays, but it is no less unforgiving,
intense and essentially human. If I were to try to give it a weird
blurb, I'd say it's a strange cross between Woman and Scarecrow and A Doll's House with Yuppies. Woman and Scarecrow was an intensely psychological, intensely symbolic play -- a divine play in many ways; Marble
contains the same urges and similar themes, but juxtaposes them with
the ordinary, the "rules and regulations" -- written and unwritten -- of
everyday urban life with all its compromises and relationships between
people -- Two businessmen, Art and Ben, who are old friends, and their
respective wives Anne and Catherine. Art and Catherine share a dream of
making love in a room of marble, and the destructive power of the
subconscious urges toward something more than their ordinary lives
begins to take over conscious daytime life, with its everyday, regulated
dying by degrees, its social roles and responsibilities and jealousy.
It echoes the still-modern themes of A Doll's House with the
question of the individual and society; with the reminder of a parent's
responsibility to their children; and the refrain that the world outside
the family home and the safe if restrictive social structures is cold,
unfriendly, and perhaps impossible to survive. Yearning after something
more destroys what is.
Carr displays herself and her
language like a virtuoso in this play. Her ever poetic, symbolist
language sits almost strangely in the mouths of characters in quotidian
grey suits and 'sophisticated house mom' slacks and heels. The
juxtaposition is a reminder that there could be more depth to life than
Anne's regimented three glasses of wine before bed or Art's continual
brandy and cigars after work -- that somewhere buried in them, there is
something more to yearn after. There are "catch it if you
can" references to some of her earlier plays. A conversation between
Ben and Catherine about a play Catherine has bought tickets to dismisses
what sounds awfully like Woman and Scarecrow: "I forget the
name of it . . . about the auld one dying" / 'Auld ones dying don't
interest me. Women who've stopped ovulating should die offstage. Who
cares?". . . , while at another point Anne is reading a French novel
about "tasteful incest" which immediately made me think of Portia Coughlan (which does indeed deal with incest -- and suicide -- tastefully, though it is definitely not French).
I came
out of the play wanting to see it again as well as wanting to buy the
script as soon as it is published. Because, I feel there is much more
in it than anyone would be able to catch the first time around. Marble
is an opaque symbol.
