“Marina Carr: Making and Unmaking Mythic Stories”
Marina Carr, one of Ireland’s most significant contemporary dramatists, has won acclaim for her dramatic representations of disruptive female figures and this, to a great extent, has been popularly interpreted as an effort to ‘unsilence’ women’s voices on the stage. Her attention to narrative, her rich use of language and dialect, and her choice of rural settings seem to situate her as the contemporary heir to a Syngean legacy. Beyond this, her commitment to tragedy, myth, the supernatural and the exploration of extreme emotions are identifiable as central characteristics of her plays since The Mai. This lecture will present an overview of Carr’s work and her extended engagement with making and deconstructing mythic narratives. It will pay particular attention to Carr’s key works in the twenty-first century such as: On Raftery’s Hill, Woman and Scarecrow, Marble, Hecuba and Audrey, or Sorrow as a means of illuminating Carr’s provocative and often ambivalent interventions into Irish theatre.
