Marina Carr: Shades of Gregory
In a handwritten draft of By the Bog of Cats from 1995 the central character Angel Waters says, ‘Ah am wan of ye! Noha piece a’ livestock to be shunted from pasture to pasture’. 1 Angel’s plea for inclusion in her own community echoes women’s refusal to be consigned to the margins of Irish theatre. This book locates the theatre of Marina Carr within a female genealogy that revises the patriarchal sweep of modern Irish drama. The creative vision of Lady Augusta Gregory (1852–1932), playwright and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre , underpins my analysis of Carr’s dramatic vision throughout the book in order to resituate the woman artist as central to Irish theatre. 2 In exploring the work of Marina Carr, I will identify resonances between the two playwrights to illuminate a matriarchal lineage in a tradition which has historically ‘shunted’ women from the dominant spaces. As Maureen Waters and Lucy McDiarmid point out, Lady Gregory ‘gave token respect to the patriarchy of the Anglo-Irish but her political unconscious was matriarchal’. 3
Augusta Gregory and Marina Carr have to a great extent been positioned as the ‘token-women’ of Irish theatre. When I began researching Irish theatre in the 1990s the prevailing assumption was that ‘there was Lady Gregory in the Abbey and then along came Marina Carr sixty years later’ with no other women before or since. The token woman is the construct of the ‘successful woman’ who, being validated by patriarchal standards, is allowed conditional entry to mainstream culture. As a result of her ‘extraordinary’ status the token woman is permitted to stand-in as a totalising representative of all women. While this might seem like a role model, tokenism is in fact an oppressive strategy that undermines both the token woman herself and all other women by reducing them to one impossible symbol. Tokenism erases the complex identities and many achievements of Gregory and Carr to one-dimensional symbolic status and further, distances them from all other women in a clever double oppression. Through no fault of her own a token woman becomes alienated from other women; she is the impossible patriarchal ideal marked against an always inadequate female reality. Radical feminist Mary Daly explains that certain women have been positioned by patriarchy as the ‘A-mazing’ scapegoat or token who is ‘given an artificial self; she is cosmeticized by her tormentor to such an extent that she is unrecognisable to her own kind. [T]hose total women taken as tokens before they had a chance to be Selves’. 4
A key publicity image from the glossy 2004 ‘AbbeyOneHundred’ centenary programme depicts Marina Carr’s face encircled by seven male playwrights and Lady Gregory in profile, whose face is the smallest in the group. 5 The ‘AbbeyOneHundred’ image is an example of the symbolic centrality and subjective disavowal of women throughout Irish theatre past and present where the mismatch between image and reality shows how there is indeed ‘a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed’. 6 While Carr is the central figure in the picture, women were all but excluded from the Abbey centenary programme. The image distils the objectification of women, masking beneath its elegant aesthetic a violent macro-annihilation on the national stage. Contrary to what would be perceived from the illustration not one of Gregory’s 42 plays were produced during the year-long centenary programme of the theatre that she co-founded and which would not exist today if it were not for her plays’ unrivalled success in the box office during her lifetime. Her best-known play Spreading the News was given a one-off Tuesday afternoon reading in the rehearsal room in the ‘Reading the Decades’ series and she was the only playwright to share her slot with the work of another writer—George Bernard Shaw’s The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet . 7 Carr’s Portia Coughlan received a short revival on the Peacock stage. The only other work by a woman to be included was Paula Meehan’s children’s play The Wolf of Winter which was staged in schools and the Peacock Theatre . No play by a woman was produced on the main stage.
Fast forward to 2016 and the notorious re-performed oppression of the 1916 Centenary Abbey Theatre programme ‘Waking the Nation’ where 90% of the plays were written by men. The only play by a woman was Ali White’s monologue drama for primary school audiences Me, Mollser (After O’Casey) which comprised the Schools and Community outreach as part of The Abbey Theatre’s ‘Priming the Canon series’. 8 The ‘Waking the Nation’ programme proudly stated: ‘We consider our stage to be a platform for freedom of expression. We believe our artists can tell the story of who we are and who we might become. Will you bear witness to the stories they have to tell?’ 9 The grassroots movement #WakingTheFeminists began on social media at the end of October 2015 in outraged response to this male ‘platform for freedom of expression’. Theatre maker and activist Lian Bell mobilised the campaign and the twitter hashtag #WTFeminists rapidly went viral, garnering international support from Meryl Streep among others. There were three public meetings of #WakingTheFeminists during its one year of activity, instigating dialogues between directors, programmers, policy-makers and the government in terms of implementing and sustaining gender equality across the theatre sector. In 2017 #WakingTheFeminists published Gender Counts: An Analysis of Gender in Irish Theatre 2006–2015 which sourced data on 1155 productions. 10 Bell writes, ‘the power of the campaign took on a life of its own, touching not only the theatre, but affecting the whole cultural community […]. In one short year of the campaign there have been some extraordinary shifts, both in the working practices of many of our major organisations, and in the openness with which we can discuss gender as an issue’. 11
Prior to this new era of gender-equality awareness, Marina Carr and Augusta Gregory have long endured the beleaguered status of standing-in for all, and no, women in Irish theatre. In 2007 Carr reflects, ‘If you asked anyone, who are the women in Irish Theatre for the last one hundred years, I think you would be hard pressed to get a response beyond Lady Gregory and Maud Gonne ’. 12 The more successful Marina Carr became in the 1990s the more she was singled-out as ‘Ireland’s leading female playwright’. 13 In The Irish Times in 2000 Carr is described as ‘the youngest, most accomplished and many would argue the only Irish woman playwright who has made her mark’. 14 Yet Carr asks the key question: ‘Why is it that you never hear of “male playwrights”, only “playwrights”, and you constantl...