By the Bog of Cats by Marina Carr
By the Bog of Cats
by
Marina Carr
at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin
on the 5th September, 2015
Watching this play without any kind of background reading, foreknowledge or forewarning, it would appear that the author follows and abides with excruciating exactitude to the unities of time, place and character laid down in Aristotle’s Poetics. Of course it hardly comes as a surprise to learn that the play is a version of Euripede’s Medea. By the Bog of Cats is both populist and poetic in its stylistic rendering of antiquities most controversial, enfant terrible and intrepid revolutionist Euripides who eventually died in exile in Macedonia rather than imbibing a cup of hemlock as his contemporary Socrates did. Euripides has come down to us as something of a misogynist but this is a fallacious accusation because Euripides alone among his other great contemporaries Aeschylus and Sophocles really does take the side of women and other outsiders and victims. His Medea is such a victim. The most complete source for the play was the Argonautica of Apollonious, the only epic poem of the Hellenistic period (the period about 300BC which followed the classical period of circa 400-600BC). The poem takes its title from Jason’s ship the Argo, a talking ship endowed with magical powers containing a beam of Dodonian oak, apparently. Jason gathers a band of warriors and poets, including Heracles and Orpheus, the Argonauts, and goes in search of the Golden Fleece, a mythical and possibly symbolical artefact which has been explained as being a book on alchemy, a form of sheep husbandry, the sun and techniques of farming and mining! The poem is clearly derivative of Homer’s Odyssey and many episodes from the Argonautica have parallels in that work. Jason voyages to Colchis on the Black Sea, slays a terrible dragon, gains a wife, Medea, the daughter of Aetes, King of Colchis, after also slaying a field of skeleton warriors sewn from the dragon’s teeth. This was brought enduringly to life (in more ways than one) in the film Jason and the Argonauts, a further Hollywoodisation of the epic and Ray Harryhausen’s unforgettable animated skeleton warrior sequence. Medea returns to Corinth, Greece as Jason’s wife. The text is thus over-written as an epic poem derived from endless secondary material and being palpably derived from further, infinitely superior material. However, in the Twentieth Century it was the most performed play of the classical era of Greek drama and its abiding appeal is in terms of the outsider as victim, feminism and the urgent need of a woman to find her own life, to fashion her own destiny. Marina Carr’s version of Medea is set in a mythical landscape, the eponymous bog of cats, summing up the landscape of Ireland. The play thus sets up predictable parallels between the legends of ancient Greece and Ireland, landscape, property and women, cycles of violence all of which might be summarised as ‘troubles’. Carr’s play is both realistic and poetic (the playwright creates dynamic, contemporary prose instead replacing Euripides original text) but the dialogue is poised between the symbolic and the ordinary and never quite settles for either. The plays populist verve and symbolic, epic backdrop are never easily resolved. At times the dialogue is jarring (and even toe curlingly embarrassing) as sentiment is evoked rather than feeling and the poetic meanderings of the author never quite convince us that her heroine, Hester Swane, and other characters really have stepped out of myth but seem rather steeped in it. The set design seems to be the best thing about the play which is more dirge than tragedy because everything is made explicit and even sub plots which might have made the material more palatable are excluded. Hester meets the ghost of her murdered brother, an unconvincing episode. Later, perhaps unsurprisingly, Hester is threatened at gunpoint by her husband’s new father-in-law for she has gate crashed his wedding wearing her own wedding frock. Haven’t these people heard of divorce, one muses! The sentiment is trowelled on as Hester burns down her own home, kills her husband’s cattle, kills her daughter Josie and then herself (she’s a tinker, incidentally, which seems to be some synonym for a “gypsy” or traveller for the “gypsies” weren’t Egyptian at all but originated rather in northern India. Medea was also a foreigner.) For all that the play was well received by an audience who gave it a standing ovation which perhaps intimates that these strategies that the author has deployed and which I have deplored really do work.
Watching this play without any kind of background reading, foreknowledge or forewarning, it would appear that the author follows and abides with excruciating exactitude to the unities of time, place and character laid down in Aristotle’s Poetics. Of course it hardly comes as a surprise to learn that the play is a version of Euripede’s Medea. By the Bog of Cats is both populist and poetic in its stylistic rendering of antiquities most controversial, enfant terrible and intrepid revolutionist Euripides who eventually died in exile in Macedonia rather than imbibing a cup of hemlock as his contemporary Socrates did. Euripides has come down to us as something of a misogynist but this is a fallacious accusation because Euripides alone among his other great contemporaries Aeschylus and Sophocles really does take the side of women and other outsiders and victims. His Medea is such a victim. The most complete source for the play was the Argonautica of Apollonious, the only epic poem of the Hellenistic period (the period about 300BC which followed the classical period of circa 400-600BC). The poem takes its title from Jason’s ship the Argo, a talking ship endowed with magical powers containing a beam of Dodonian oak, apparently. Jason gathers a band of warriors and poets, including Heracles and Orpheus, the Argonauts, and goes in search of the Golden Fleece, a mythical and possibly symbolical artefact which has been explained as being a book on alchemy, a form of sheep husbandry, the sun and techniques of farming and mining! The poem is clearly derivative of Homer’s Odyssey and many episodes from the Argonautica have parallels in that work. Jason voyages to Colchis on the Black Sea, slays a terrible dragon, gains a wife, Medea, the daughter of Aetes, King of Colchis, after also slaying a field of skeleton warriors sewn from the dragon’s teeth. This was brought enduringly to life (in more ways than one) in the film Jason and the Argonauts, a further Hollywoodisation of the epic and Ray Harryhausen’s unforgettable animated skeleton warrior sequence. Medea returns to Corinth, Greece as Jason’s wife. The text is thus over-written as an epic poem derived from endless secondary material and being palpably derived from further, infinitely superior material. However, in the Twentieth Century it was the most performed play of the classical era of Greek drama and its abiding appeal is in terms of the outsider as victim, feminism and the urgent need of a woman to find her own life, to fashion her own destiny. Marina Carr’s version of Medea is set in a mythical landscape, the eponymous bog of cats, summing up the landscape of Ireland. The play thus sets up predictable parallels between the legends of ancient Greece and Ireland, landscape, property and women, cycles of violence all of which might be summarised as ‘troubles’. Carr’s play is both realistic and poetic (the playwright creates dynamic, contemporary prose instead replacing Euripides original text) but the dialogue is poised between the symbolic and the ordinary and never quite settles for either. The plays populist verve and symbolic, epic backdrop are never easily resolved. At times the dialogue is jarring (and even toe curlingly embarrassing) as sentiment is evoked rather than feeling and the poetic meanderings of the author never quite convince us that her heroine, Hester Swane, and other characters really have stepped out of myth but seem rather steeped in it. The set design seems to be the best thing about the play which is more dirge than tragedy because everything is made explicit and even sub plots which might have made the material more palatable are excluded. Hester meets the ghost of her murdered brother, an unconvincing episode. Later, perhaps unsurprisingly, Hester is threatened at gunpoint by her husband’s new father-in-law for she has gate crashed his wedding wearing her own wedding frock. Haven’t these people heard of divorce, one muses! The sentiment is trowelled on as Hester burns down her own home, kills her husband’s cattle, kills her daughter Josie and then herself (she’s a tinker, incidentally, which seems to be some synonym for a “gypsy” or traveller for the “gypsies” weren’t Egyptian at all but originated rather in northern India. Medea was also a foreigner.) For all that the play was well received by an audience who gave it a standing ovation which perhaps intimates that these strategies that the author has deployed and which I have deplored really do work.
Paul Murphy
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