A dead black swan, a blind seer, a visitor from the realm of death: portents pile up for the outcast Hester Swane in Marina Carr’s bleak play from 1998. Blending folklore and Greek myth, its setting is an ancient bog in the Irish midlands, conceived as treacherous terrain, concealing secrets of all kinds. Rejected by Carthage (Barry John O’Connor), her former lover who is making an advantageous marriage, Hester (Susan Lynch) refuses to leave the bog or to give up their daughter, Josie.
In Monica Frawley’s set design, the snow-covered landscape forms a gleaming amphitheatre, beautifully evoking Euripides’ Medea, which is the inspiration for this play. The vast white ridge helps create the dreamlike mood with which Selina Cartmell’s production opens. Death’s emissary, the Ghost Fancier, sings a country-and-western dirge, Hester’s caravan pokes out of the bog at a skewed angle, and video projections show lingering closeups of Hester and Josie.
Cartmell is a frequent collaborator with Carr, having directed a number of her plays and most recently an opera, but this time the production and text seem to be pulling in different directions. Carr’s dialogue is often so explicatory that surreal directorial touches are redundant. The second half of the play sees Hester increasingly embattled, as she crashes Carthage’s wedding, is threatened at gunpoint by his new father-in-law and visited by her murdered brother’s ghost. In all the shouted exchanges of self-justification and recrimination, and in the grotesque comedy of the wedding, there are no subtexts.
“I’m afraid of meself,” Hester says, and she is right to be. Yet her self-knowledge can’t save her from her actions, which are presented as inevitable. While in Greek tragedy the violence always occurs off stage, here the characters become impotent spectators to Hester’s spiralling rage, looking down on her as she cradles the child she has murdered, then stabs herself. Knowing that this was coming doesn’t make it any less brutal, but playing everything out so explicitly detracts from something necessary: a sense of pity.
• At the Abbey, Dublin, until 12 September. Box office: 00 3531 8787222.
