By the Bog of Cats

Selina Cartmell directs Marina Carr’s relocation of Medea to the Midlands for its first revival since its 1998 Abbey premiere.

We meet Hester Swane (Susan Lynch) in what seems a disused quarry next the titular bog, dragging a dead black swan, a prophetic bird from which the blind Catwoman (Brid Ni Neachtain) divines Hester’s death by sundown. This emphasises the earlier omen of Hester meeting the Ghost Fancier (David Shannon) in the morning fog, who apologised for being early… Hester’s day was already set to be bad as Carthage Kilbride (Barry John O’Connor), the father of her child Josie (Eve Maher/Elodie Devins), is marrying the much younger Caroline Cassidy (Rachel O’Byrne), the daughter of big farmer Xavier Cassidy (Peter Gowen). The vinegary Mrs Kilbride (Marion O’Dwyer) is delighted at this advantageous match, that will ‘knock some semblance of legitimacy’ into her granddaughter. But Hester is determined not to go quietly, despite her neighbour Monica Murray (Jane Brennan) begging Hester to keep her signed promise to leave the bog for the new house in the town that Xavier has bought her…

Monica Frawley’s set is impressively stark, the craggy rocks being relieved only by a tent in the background for the raucous wedding sequence. This channels the intensity of Greek tragedy which Carr smashes into Irish archetypes. Catwoman the Tiresian blind seer mingles with an Irish mammy from Hell in Mrs Kilbride, Hester’s Tinker blood is the barbarian origins that Greeks despise, while Creon banishing Medea from Corinth is Xavier moving Hester off the bog; except that Xavier is also a monstrous patriarch out of John McGahern’s work. Irish country and western music floats over proceedings, even inflecting the cowboy-outfitted drawling Ghost Fancier, but Kilian Waters’ AV design is oddly under-used, indeed largely abandoned after a prologue in which Hester’s sunken caravan is investigated by a character who disappears out of sight but whose point-of-view is relayed on a big screen. This play is about passion, mostly the thirst for revenge, as conveyed by Lynch in a performance of snarling intensity.

But, as Euripides’ 1960s translator Philip Vellacott noted, Medea presents “an oppressed victim claiming sympathy” until “the punishment shows itself twice as wicked as the crime, sympathy changes sides; and we are left with only one comfort, that since the worst has been reached, there can be no worse thing to follow.” After the interval Carr unduly prolongs Hester’s embittered rampage, as we’ve lost sympathy by dint of her past before she proves childishly and murderously unwilling to distinguish between death and exile. Hester’s most affecting scenes come before the interval: lamenting her betrayal by Carthage, making fun of Mrs Kilbride with her daughter Josie. O’Dwyer is hilariously spiteful before the interval as Mrs Kilbride, but raises the roof as a Freudian nightmare against the double-act of Ni Neachtain’s Catwoman and Des Nealon’s Fr Willow at the memorable wedding bacchanalia. O’Byrne evinces a quiet sadness, while special mention must go to the young actress playing Josie with bright, phenomenal confidence.

By the Bog of Cats is a production of admirable commitment which loses its way latterly because of its repetitious focus on Hester but lingers long in the mind.

3.5/5

By the Bog of Cats continues its run at the Abbey until September 12^th.

Dublin Theatre Festival: 10 Plays

Peer Gynt 27 Sep – 16 Oct Belvedere College
Rough Magic’s writer Arthur Riordan updates Ibsen’s most fantastical play about loves lost and folkloric psychosis. Talking Movies favourite Rory Nolan plays the titular delusional hero and Tarab, not Grieg, provide a live musical accompaniment. Phaedra last year was a misfiring production with a similar blend of ingredients so this 3 hour show is a recommendation, with caveats…

The Lulu House 27 Sep – 16 Oct James Joyce House
Selina Cartmell, who wowed the Fringe last year directing Medea, returns with another femme fatale. Lorcan Cranitch and Camille O’Sullivan star in a mixture of musical, drama and film inspired by German playwright Wedekind’s original character and also Pabst’s silent film Pandora’s Box. This only lasts one hour, but it should be a visually rich experience.

Donka, A letter to Chekhov 29 Sep – 2 Oct Gaiety
The traditional circus spectacular at the Gaiety comes from Russia, and is one of two Festival shows about Chekhov. Clowns, acrobats and musicians not only create the world of Chekhov’s characters but, by using his diaries, portray his inner emotional world. Writer and director Daniele Finzi Pasca has previously helmed a Cirque de Soleil show and Broadway musical Rain so this should be dazzling.

Testament 29 Sep – 16 Oct Project Arts Centre
Colm Toibin writes a play, Garry Hynes directs it and Marie Mullen performs it. What could possibly go wrong? Well…. Toibin’s not a playwright, Druid do occasionally screw up, and Mullen destroyed 2007’s Long Day’s Journey into Night with her hammy turn. This is a 90 minute uninterrupted monologue with Mullen as the Virgin Mary (or maybe not, it’s vague) which could become very long…

Juno and the Paycock 29 Sep – 15 Oct Abbey
The Abbey team up with Southbank’s National Theatre for this co-production of Sean O’Casey’s old war-horse. A starry cast includes Ciaran Hinds as Captain Boyle, Risteard Cooper as his drinking buddy Joxer and Sinead Cusack as Mrs Boyle. Druid and Abbey regulars like Clare Dunne and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor fill out the ensemble grappling with melodramatic misfortunes in the middle of the Civil War.

The Speckled People 29 Sep – 15 Oct Gate
Patrick Mason is a great director, and Denis Conway, John Kavanagh and Tadhg Murphy accomplished actors, but it’s hard to regard Hugo Hamilton’s adaptation of his own memoir as anything but ‘ugh, complain theatre’, to paraphrase Clueless. Stephen Brennan will undoubtedly play the ultra-nationalist Irish father oppressing his son’s German identity, probably as a variant on his abrasive patriarch from Phaedra.

La Voix Humaine 29 Sep – 2 Oct Samuel Beckett Theatre
Jean Cocteau’s celebrated story of a desperate woman making a last-ditch phone call to her ex-lover is performed with surtitles by acclaimed Dutch actress Halina Reijn. This is a bit pricey (2 euro a minute) given that’s it’s an hour long monologue with minimalist set, but Ivo van Hove is a celebrated director and will play on the audience’s voyeuristic instincts to achieve catharsis.

The Animals and Children Took to the Streets 29 Sep – 2 Oct Project Arts Centre
Theatre company 1927’s macabre cabaret style unfurls a bizarre tenement story that’s a mixture of Fritz Lang, Charles Dickens and Tim Burton. A mix of live music and performance with pre-recorded film and animation this might be the most distinctive show of the festival aesthetically. Again nearly 2 euro a minute…

16 Possible Glimpses 30 Sep – 15 Oct Peacock
Chekhov is highly regarded at this year’s festival, but that doesn’t stretch to any of his plays being performed. Instead a second play about his life and work sees Abbey favourite Marina Carr thankfully eschewing misery in the midlands for an imaginative fantasia on Chekhov, using a series of vignettes to throw his most haunting characters into his turbulent productive life.

Slattery’s Sago Saga 6 Oct – 16 Oct Rathfarnham Castle
In our end is our beginning, Arthur Riordan re-writing an old master, here adapting an unfinished novel by Flann O’Brien. Rathfarnham Castle? A dashed odd place for a play you’d say, unless you knew that this was the site-specific Performance Corporation unleashing a surreal political satire involving the quiet life of Poguemahone Hall being shattered by a T.D. with an insane plan. It involves sago…