No one, I confidently told an academic friend this week, writes tragedy any more. I reckoned, however, without the formidable Marina Carr, whose new play - the centrepiece of the 45th Dublin theatre festival - imports blood-stained Greek myths into modern Ireland. The result, although thematically overloaded, is a work of dark, unsettling power.
Carr's heroine Ariel, hardly seen but haunting the action, is the 16-year-old daughter of a rich businessman, Fermoy Fitzgerald. Having made money from the cement business, Fermoy now plans to enter politics; but, far from being a crowd-pleaser, he is a biblical fundamentalist who talks ominously of "blood-sacrifice" and who disdains the national disease of "wanting to be liked". Ten years on, he is a rising political star and is tipped as the next taoiseach. But it gradually dawns on us that his meteoric ascent is connected with his daughter's disappearance, and what we see is a cycle of family revenge-killings that makes the House of Atreus look moderately well adjusted.
Having invoked Medea in an earlier play, By the Bog of Cats, Carr now taps into memories of Iphigenia in Aulis, Electra and even Hamlet. You could offer all manner of rational objections to her work. Wouldn't the police, for instance, show some interest in Ariel's apparent vanishing act and, in a secular age, would a politician who claimed to have direct access to God stand much chance of election? Even the use of a TV interview to explain Fermoy's rise from factory owner to political luminary raises more questions than it answers and acts as a shaky narrative bridge.
Yet, unlike Sebastian Barry's Hinterland, which also explored the connection between political success and moral corruption, Carr's play has an unabashed theatricality: Fermoy's fundamentalism, for instance, is wittily contrasted with the weary cynicism of his monkish brother, Boniface, who claims: "My God is an auld fella in a tent, addicted to broccoli." Carr also seems to be possessed by a genuine poetic vision: that behind the smiling, secular face of modern Ireland lurk primal blood-lusts and ancestral hatreds. As always her chosen setting is the bog-ridden Irish midlands where she clearly believes the family is a source of vengeful violence; and even if her play is not a total hit, it emerges as more than a modernised Greek myth.
Conall Morrison's production contains any number of strong performances. Mark Lambert lends Fermoy a strutting Napoleonic power and maniacal fervour wonderfully offset by the etiolated exhaustion of Barry McGovern's whisky-priest. Ingrid Craigie as Fermoy's grief-addicted wife does electrifying battle with Eileen Walsh as her surviving Electra-like daughter. No one could call this a perfect play, but it confirms Carr's status as a writer who, in an age of ironic detachment, believes in the enduring possibility of tragedy.
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