Stage

The rock dictum of ‘live fast, die young and leave a good corpse’ is not a philosophy which appeals to playwright Marina Carr. She may be fully aware that the precedents for Kurt Cobain’s suicide go back to Romantic poets like Shelley and Keats but she much prefers to use as her role models those who persevere, and create until at least their late eighties, like Picasso.

And those who, at even half that age have generations of experience to reflect upon, through the eyes of their families, as is the case in her latest play The Mai, which opened this week at the Peacock theatre, as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival.

“I suffered a form of crisis of confidence after my last play was taken off and didn’t write for a while but then I stood back, looked at my work and changed direction, realising I’ve a long way to go, as a playwright, before I reach Picasso’s age!” she says, at 29. Laughing, and tapping into the sense of the absurd that marked her last play, Ullaloo , she adds “mind you, Picasso gave up smoking at 91 and was dead at 92 so I guess I better keep on smoking!”

However it is a move away from theatre of the absurd which is the change of direction Marina has taken for The Mai.

“I realised I’d picked up on that, out of Beckett, Ionesco and all the Absurdists but that it wasn’t my own style” she says. “So the new play is influenced more by the Greek tragedy, naturalistic writers like Chekov and so on. It’s about destiny and fate and about how patterns repeat themselves in families no matter how hard we try to break away from that. And all this I examine through four generations of women.”

Linking these women, says Marina laughing, is the fact that all “unfortunately adore men who are bastards.”

“There’s nothing wrong with adoring men, provided it’s reciprocated and provided you can function” she explains. “But the problem with these women is that they place men on a pedestal, see men only as the ultimate love-object, the panacea for everything. And in the case of one woman this manifests itself is the fact that she can’t even leave a relationship, though she knows it’s over. She’s enslaved by an ideal, by believing in her illusions even though it almost kills her.”

Irrespective of how the critics respond to The Mai Marina Carr insists that she will not be silenced, on a creative level, if the play is a flop.

“Hopefully it won’t flop but I already have written two first drafts of new plays, one is for the Project and the other is for Hollis Street hospital” she says. “I’m also doing something for Druid so my future certainly isn’t riding on this play. Indeed, after the lull that followed the last play I must admit I’m really happy with the way my work is progressing now – tragically happy!”

Recommended: Apart from those home-grown productions listed as recommendations in the last issue of Hot Press, must-see shows in this year’s Dublin Theatre festival also include Decameron 646 based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s novel of the same name and probably more important for what it tells us about the Florentine merchant class in the wake of the Black Death than for it’s infamous sex scenes. It’s on at the Tivoli until October 8th.

Music from sex god Jim Morrison and the Doors, features heavily in Riders on the Storm, at the City Arts Centre. Written by two 16 year-old students the play won this year’s Young Playwrights Programme, organised by Very Special Arts. Ruby Red, on the other hand, draws its musical influences from Operatic love duets, Fassbinder films, Indian dance drama and B movies as it evokes a “scrap-book seen thrugh a single soul” and danced by four women, again at the Tivoli. One of many fascinating productions at this year’s Theatre festival.

See you there.