‘On bog, many bogs’: Theatrical Space, Visual Image and Meaning in Some Productions of Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…¹¹⁵

Enrica Cerquoni

The present epoch will perhaps be, above all, the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. (Michel Foucault)¹¹⁶

Because we no longer have one shared place, one Ireland, we can no longer have a naturalistic theatre of recognition […] We must instead have a theatre of evocation in which strange worlds, not our own, are in Yeats’s phrase, ‘called to the eye of the mind’.¹¹⁷

Now […] there is a sense of people not belonging to a territory anymore, but belonging to a state of mind. People would make their home less in terms of territory now.¹¹⁸

As a woman I have no country.¹¹⁹

Inspired perhaps by Michel Foucault’s assertion that ‘the present epoch will perhaps above all be the epoch of space’, cultural theory in the last decades of the twentieth century has recognized space as a seminal category in critical and cultural studies. What Liam Harte defines as a ‘spatial turn which has occurred under the aegis of postmodernism’¹²⁰ has shown the radical potential of spatial analysis in re-thinking both the methodology and the subject-matter of cultural discourse. It has also questioned the older critical reliance on time as a key analytical category. Human experience belongs as much to space as to time.

It could be argued that the invisibility of space-based studies in the established cultural scenario for most of the twentieth century stretches back to ossifying gender divisions perpetuated by a masculinist discourse based on unity, fixity and exclusion: in classical mythology the story of Odysseus and Penelope has always told people from different times and different places how man, moving actively outside the house from one adventure to another, is a free agent of time, whereas woman, waiting and waiting within the four walls of the house, is an element of space. In William Blake’s allegory in ‘A Vision of the Last Judgement’ (1810) that connection is, alas, openly stated: ‘Time is a Man, Space is a Woman’.¹²¹

To re-evaluate spatial analysis then becomes a way of giving voice to differences and complexities, and not just gender-related ones. It points to the creation of a constructive dialogue between issues of ‘otherness’, be they related to gender, class, ethnicity, culture and so on. It also re-opens the stiffness of cultural categories, re-shuffling them and asking us to refocus our vision.

Space seems to be a particularly significant measure of analysis in the Irish context due to the ‘highly contested nature of space on this island from colonial to contemporary times’ (Harte, p.8). Under the influence of this spatial ‘lens’, the question of ‘who one is and who one can be’ appears to become a ‘function of where one is and how one experiences that place’¹²². The imbrication of space, place and identity has proved crucial in shaping questions of national historical experience, and this is so even more now, in post-millennium European Ireland, where to the existing divisions between Northerners and Southerners, urban and rural, ‘settled’, half-settled and traveller, an influx of immigrant arrivals has added further complexity. This growing presence of non-nationals has re-opened questions of who people are, of where people belong, of how fractured and slippery the borders of territory are, and of how margins need to be enlarged to make space for the multiplicity of society, for anomalous and liminal spaces, for the co-presence of diverse and often conflicting world-views and ‘hybrid’ identities. As Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift argue, the absolutism of

‘root’ metaphors, fixed in place, is replaced by mobile ‘route’ metaphors which can lay down a challenge to the fixed identities of ‘cultural’ insiderism¹²³.

What is home/homeland, by the way? Is it one or more than one? Is it a possible or impossible space, a dystopic or utopic notion? And how do woman and man redefine it in today’s Ireland?

In response to these issues, in this article I intend to explore the perceptual and conceptual articulations of theatrical space as defined by Carr’s play By the Bog of Cats… and accomplished in the Irish premiere in 1998. I will also look, in less detail, at two American productions both staged in the United States in 2001. Occasionally, this analysis will journey through articulations of space in Carr’s previous plays The Mai and Portia Coughlan, so as to contextualize the dramatic designs of By the Bog of Cats… by reference to these earlier works by the same author and specifically set in the Midlands.

This interpretation will attempt to highlight how, in differently rendered visual images of space, a multifaceted and always diverse notion of landscape is foregrounded. Nonetheless, in each uniquely presented ‘bogland’, the relation between female and landscape inevitably reopens the debate on what homeland is, and how to redefine it in woman’s terms. It will also underscore the inherent theatricality of Carr’s mise en scène as well as the playwright’s and stage designers’ key-roles in reinventing Irish theatrical locations less burdened by national traditions. These locations are both real and imagined, present and absent, familiar and unfamiliar, home and not-home. One bog, many bogs; one Ireland, many Irelands.

II

Given the central role played by space in the theatrical presentation, it is particularly challenging to apply spatial analysis to it. As an art form that is ephemeral and shifting as well as real and concrete, theatre becomes a unique apparatus for reaching out towards differences, for broadening, through the creation of actual and imagined spaces, plural notions of identity and states of mind.

The space of the stage, being both a physical and imaginative realm, is at once here and elsewhere. As spectators we don’t just imagine or dream of an ‘elsewhere’: the ‘elsewhere’ is indeed ‘here’, before us, as tangible and material as it could be. Yet, it is not. This continual and engulfing slippage between the physical and the fictional space in theatre keeps spectators in a continual suspension between the ‘here’ and the ‘not-here’. Gaston Bachelard’s notion of the mysterious imaginary potential of the interior spaces of chests and caskets becomes an excellent image to express theatre and the secret powers of its visual evocation. Chests and caskets, as objects that ‘may be opened’ and closed, are ‘fraught with unknown and possible elements’¹²⁴, thus engendering a series of limitless possibilities. Similarly, the stage is at once a space of closure and revelation, a liminal place, a border zone where spectators, alongside performers, journey through spaces of alternative possibilities and hidden realms. The spatial conception of a play is filled out and enriched in the visual aspects of a stage production. Undoubtedly, theatre is about word, sound and silence. But it is also about image, movement and presence.

In 1998, Marina Carr’s play By the Bog of Cats… premiered at the Abbey Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. This was the first play written by a woman dramatist to be produced on the main stage of the national theatre for decades. In a country where, in Robert O’Byrne’s words, ‘cultural idols are far more likely to be male than female’¹²⁵ this choice would instead potentially represent a wider and plural notion of Ireland based on difference and innovation. Besides, the play could certainly answer Fintan O’Toole’s partly justified preoccupation with the idea of Irish theatre as bogged down by words and stories, and less prone to enhanced visual presentation.¹²⁶

Criticism has widely acknowledged Carr’s extraordinary ability in using narrative drama and her powerful mastery of the verbal, to the extent that Eileen Battersby has claimed how ‘language dominates her approach to writing’.¹²⁷ What criticism has explored less is Carr’s strong visual consciousness, her power as ‘image-maker, as creator of striking pictures that illuminate the stage and […] animate the inner stage of the audience’s imagination’¹²⁸. Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… is particularly vibrant in visual components. In it, the verbal imagery successfully meshes with the powerful visual image thus epitomizing that ‘theatre of evocation’ that O’Toole’s opening quote recalls.

III

From the opening stage directions, Carr invites practitioners and audiences to see landscape as a dominating and elemental force: ‘Dawn. On the Bog of Cats. A bleak white landscape of ice and snow’¹²⁹. In this first immediate, vividly physical image what catches the eye is a Beckettian expanse of water and mist, frozen, surreal, harsh and wild. Indeterminate and open, it is also shifting, mutable and vast, as one of characters explains to us quite early in the play: ‘this auld bog, always shiftin’ and changin’ and coddin’ the eye’ (BBOC, p.15).

The surrounding landscape is, for Carr, another character: ‘it needs to be present, to have a presence’ (Battersby, p.15). This assertion also sounds true of her previous ‘Midlands’ plays. In The Mai (1994) the inside space of the dream-house is located on the edge of Owl Lake, a presence embodying darkness and unhappiness; in Portia Coughlan (1996) the presence is that of the Belmont River, a physical location but also and especially the personification of Portia’s obsession with her twin-brother, with her lost half self.

As J. Hillis Miller remarks ‘there is always a figure in the landscape‘¹³⁰ that will always try and have an impact on it; it will walk it, claim it, resist it. In the immense, undefined and shapeless landscape of By the Bog of Cats…, the figure is that of Hester Swane, a forty-year-old female itinerant wandering a Midland bog.

As Carr says in an interview, ‘I chose to make her a traveller because travellers are our national outsiders, aren’t they?’ (Battersby, p.15). The status of Hester’s character as the definitive outsider is also sanctioned by her mythical ascendancy: literary references throughout the play relate her not just to Medea, the half-goddess /half-human inhabiting a foreign land, but also to Dido the wanderer, the archetypal figure of the outsider. Thus, through the character of Hester, Carr has taken a mythical situation and made it relevant within the contemporary Irish and non-Irish context. Hester’s unresolved condition of settlement, her scattered sense of place and of self, becomes emblematic of what Pile and Thrift define as

the ‘unhomely’ […becoming] the norm, replacing the sovereignty of national cultures, or the universalism of national cultures [such that] new subjectivities are needed. (Pile, p.18)

The connection between female and landscape is immediately established: in the opening visual image the figure crosses the solitary space, dragging ‘the corpse of a black swan after her, leaving a trail of blood in the snow’ (BBOC, p.13). That actual and unmarked space of white snow is now transformed in a realm that suggests darkness and death. The transition to the surreal is the otherwordly presence of the Ghost Fancier, who ‘stands there watching her’. The melancholic undertones of ‘a lone violin’ (BBOC, p.13) accompanies the poetic expressiveness of the whole unrestful image.

This picture establishes a series of visual connections, of visual ‘hooks’ so to speak, which will accompany the audience throughout their journey. The first example is when, in the first scene, the Ghost Fancier hints at Hester’s complementary relationship with the dead swan, ‘What’re you doin’ draggin’ the corpse of a swan behind you like it was your shadow?’ (BBOC, p.13). In the following line, this specularity is re-enforced when Hester herself describes the difficulty in separating the dead swan from the frozen bog: ‘found her frozen in a bog hole last night, had to rip her from the ice, left half of her underbelly’ (p.13). When later on Hester claims:

I was born on the Bog of Cats and on the Bog of Cats I’ll end my days. I’ve as much right to this place as any of yees, more, for it holds me to it in ways it has never held yees (BBOC, p.35)

the audience’s earlier perception of those visual correspondences bonds character to environment. The powerful backdrop, invested with human association, advocates a suspension between memory and imagination. As spectators, we are in a shifting and permeable land which moves between contrasts: openness and closedness, reality and myth, actuality and imagination.

If Carr’s earlier ‘Midland’ plays The Mai and Portia Coughlan are, on the surface, partly set within the restrictive confines of an indoor space, (thus deceptively giving a semblance of resting within the tradition of realism and its staging of three-walled rooms), here something different catches the viewer’s eye.

Completely disrupting the realistic conventions of the fixed theatrical space, that claustrophobic interior space from which female characters have tried to release themselves in a century of Irish and non-Irish drama (remember Synge’s Nora in The Shadow of the Glen and Ibsen’s Nora in A Doll’s House?), Carr’s radical choice of an outdoor space is fraught with possibility and change.¹³¹ It could be argued that the close association of the plot with the Greek myth of Medea requiredly channels the playwright’s dramatic design towards an obligatory path, as in Greek plays the visible action usually takes place outdoors; or might it be that the open and wide outdoor space is the consequence of writing a play for a big stage like the main stage of the Abbey¹³²?

Without overlooking the arguable validity of the last two assumptions, it is valuable to emphasize the role of the writer’s creative process and also how Carr’s ‘Midland’ plays before By the Bog of Cats… reveal a gradual but radical distancing for women characters from ‘the old discourse of home which equated […it] with a sense of entrapment within naturalism’s famous four walls’ (Chaudhuri, p.xiii).

The notion of the inside space as unstable and unsafe began to be explored in The Mai and in Portia Coughlan. At a certain point in The Mai, the eponymous central character, looking around the space which she has built, claims:

this house – these days I think it’s the kind of house you’d see in a corner of a dream – dark, formless, strangely inviting. It’s the kind of house you build to keep out neuroses, to stave off nightmares. But they come in anyway with the frost and air bubbles in the radiators. It’s the kind of space you build when you have nowhere to go¹³³.

The traditional notion of the inside space as a protection, as a shelter is, in The Mai, seriously questioned; its foundations are as unstable and shaky as The Mai’s absolutist visions of love, life and family turn out to be in the play. In the following play, Portia Coughlan, this already permeable structure is completely deconstructed. The space of the house is for Portia a ‘psychic’ inferno, a monstrous limbo, in which she, and the spectator with her, experience the weak and inhuman side of people around her. The house, as Portia says, ‘is creachin’ liche a choffin, all thim wooden duurs an’ fluurs sometimes ah chan’t brathe anamore’¹³⁴. The house is no longer home.

In By the Bog of Cats… the onstage space has taken on different connotations. The interior as a domestic space has been erased from the audience’s main visual perspective, and has been replaced by an open space (which would traditionally have been positioned offstage and as such, have been envisaged only through the seductive power of language). Now, that imaginative outside, where Synge’s Nora and Ibsen’s Nora entered more than a century ago, is brought centrestage. The unseen has become visible, the absent has become present.

Unlike The Mai and Portia, whose search for identity was partly still marked by a departure from a unfulfilling domesticity, Hester’s quest for selfhood follows a different path: she moves from itinerancy, to an attempt at domesticity, to itinerancy again. She has lived in a house for a while, but as she explains to the Ghost Fancier, she ‘has never felt at home’ (p.14) in it. That house, as Hester asserts, ‘should never have been built in the first place’ (BBOC, p.63). In a crucial offstage moment at the beginning of Act Three, Hester burns the house; ‘the bed and the whole place’ (BBOC, p.59) go up in flames. According to the stage directions, the other interior setting required in the play is in the second act, to host Carthage and Caroline Cassidy’s ‘wedding’. Yet, appearances are deceptive: the interior of Xavier Cassidy’s house is no ordinary home, but a mock version of it. As will be explored later in the analysis of performance, due to the presence of an interior, the staging of this scene is an interesting point of contention; it could deceptively drag practitioners into a realistic representation which could bear visibly upon the impact of the whole conceptual image. In other words, to set this scene in a rural domestic environment is to completely miss the point.

Since the beginning, Hester’s association mainly with open or unfixed spaces such as the swan’s lair, the caravan, the yard and the bog seems to suggest a whole reconceptualization of the notion of home/homeland for female characters. This new idea moves on from a restrictive notion of indoors as a ‘natural’ space’ for women characters, and embraces placelessness and displacement not as the absence of place or as the wrong place, but as an alternative kind of ‘placement’ (Chaudhuri, p.138) which involves a combination of many distinct places. Home/homeland becomes a manifold figure, far from being ‘circumscribed and clearly defined’ (Chaudhuri, p.138), and is less linked to attributes of territorial rootedness and continuity that formed the traditional idea of belonging.

Visually, such a move releases the audience’s gaze from what Bert O. States spots as one major consequence of realist theatre’s use of a single set in one or two rooms. He calls this ‘the imprisonment of the eye [by which] … one of the two senses through which theatre comes to us is locked into a hypnotic sameness’¹³⁵. Now, like in a non-realistic painting, where pictorial space extends beyond what is presented to the viewer, likewise with theatrical space: unwilling to remain enclosed, it transcends any confinement and fixedness to open up into the ‘elsewhere’, into inward realms of dreams and memory. This is the place where Hester’s memories of her mother Josie Swane belong, and where Hester last saw her before she vanished for good beyond the endless stretch of the bog. The space of the bog then is characterized by loss and longing, yet it also represents her only site of connection and survival.

IV

In the majestic, basically monochrome and barren vastness of icy bogland created by Monica Frawley, (designer of set and costumes for the Patrick Mason production of By the Bog of Cats… in the Abbey Theatre in 1998, with Olwen Fouéré in the main role of Hester Swane), suggestiveness, movement and desolation were the main features. Frawley stresses the power of the opening description: ‘I found it extraordinary. It was the fact that it was covered in snow and hugely immediate’¹³⁶.

So snow became for her a central image. Representations of snow in artists as diverse and distant in time and aesthetics as the painter Pieter Bruegel The Elder, and the photographer-painter Cartier-Bresson, potently fuelled her imagination.

Undoubtedly, a major inspiration was the physical beauty and the spectral extra-ordinariness of the Midlands landscape where the viewer’s eye spaces out in the flatness of the bog. As Frawley says when interviewed, it ‘could go on for ever’, interspersed by sudden appearances of pools of water reflecting the sky.

All you could see was the sky, the variety of it and the pitch black colour all around. The landscape fed into me and what struck me was the amount of people living in caravans – there were loads of caravans on the bog and clothes hanging outside them – it all had a kind of ethereal beauty.

So the main artistic drive in the design process was to bring the physical and the surreal together, to get that sense of extensiveness, of people suddenly appearing in the distance and then suddenly vanishing, along with a deep sense of human isolation within such a vastness. The challenge was, of course,

to get all this within the physical confines of the Abbey stage. I wanted the image to travel from the physical to the inner; it is about an inner landscape and I wanted everything to be cold and frozen so as to convey that connection. The idea of snow is almost like the ‘petrifaction’ of Hester’s mind. (Frawley)

Fusing the inner and outer landscapes of Carr’s wintry outdoors, Frawley’s finished product was an imposing snow-clad rise of terraced ground, gouged out in levels from the misty and icy earth and extended horizontally as if in continuous slow-motion. Evoking an overwhelming feeling of chill and human solitude, the raked terraced platform stage, reminiscent in its structure of the cut-up Irish bog and of its Greek ascendancy, confronted the audience with an unfixed image that ‘didn’t rest at the edge of the eyes’ (Frawley). Instead, it was perceived as devoid of stable contours and as projecting itself endlessly in both directions and towards the horizon. Erasing any safe sense of spatial dimensionality, the image had a dream-like quality, in the sense of literally being like an image from a dream, completely edgeless, and where, as Frawley underlines,

people loom out of emptiness: take for example the image of Xavier Cassidy, performed by Tom Hickey, in his black coat, looming out of this dark and smoky ambience. Suddenly he was there, and when he was there he was incredibly there.

The atmospheric and suggestive construction potently conveyed the strong link between place and female subject: it was held in gloomy colourings, glaring under a Blakian sky, and lit by an interplay of light and shadow. Indeed, as lighting changes throughout the performance became less realistically motivated and more symbolically expressive of this eerie quality, of this in-between dimension, the scenic composition reflected the permeability and the ever-shifting facets of both environment and main character.

The conceptual stylization of the play’s outer landscape was, in this production, reflective of Hester’s pliability, of the doubleness of her experience, of the dark and light side of her inner world. At one moment it denoted attachment, and as such was nurturing and vulnerable, and at another moment harshness and brutality, and connoted separateness. Like Olwen Fouéré’s performance of Hester Swane, Frawley’s setting unfolded a specular visual narrative of resistance that defied any linear model, eschewing consistency of interpretation and easy classifications on the spectator’s part.

The stylized and slow-motion pacing of some of the actors in performing characters such as the Ghost Fancier (Pat Kinevane), or Joseph Swane (Ronan Leahy) or the Catwoman (Joan O’Hara) heightened the ominous atmosphere of brooding shadows and ghostly silhouettes and evidenced the theatricality of Carr’s dramaturgy in offering performers the possibility to cross realistic boundaries of representation. The wooden structure of stepped, unevenly-cut platforms broke the proscenium line of the Abbey stage, thus jutting the performers’ space across the audience’s space. The usual separation between the stage and the audience which characterizes the Abbey Theatre space was, in this production, partially reduced: there was a threatening closeness and the effect of constant motion was as much horizontal as frontal, in a resulting image which was dynamic and fluid.

The audience could not remain at a safe distance from what was happening onstage. They were drawn to share Hester’s quest and her displaced condition. Such an experience, strengthened through the changed relationship between the stage and the auditorium, is already present in Carr’s dramaturgy, which undoubtedly questions a ‘theatre of recognition’, and introduces crisis: the spectator views actions and characters from Hester’s perspective, through the woman outsider’s mind. The audience partakes of Hester’s crossing of spatial boundaries, of her darker vision of a marginalized existence, where ties are severed and connections to one’s fellow beings are damaged. Indeed Carr’s disruption of a ‘single’ vision goes even further and actualizes a double projection for the audience as they ‘are in the picture, beholding, yet part of it’¹³⁷.

Saintsbury’s words could be used here to allude to the audience’s twofold experience: their perception is filtered through Hester’s, yet their engagement doesn’t prevent them from ‘ironically observing themselves’¹³⁸: they could be part of those fellow beings, of those savage members of the ‘settled’ community seen in the close spatial reality before them. This effect was successfully achieved in the wedding scene of the Mason production, where it was decided to have the long wedding table out in the snow. As Frawley explains, this was quite a disputed aspect of the stage composition among the artists involved in the production:

I knew I didn’t want the idea of a naturalistic kitchen; we talked about the dropping in of a wall; we explored different possibilities. To have a table out in the snow might seem insane but you don’t have ghosts wandering around either. (Frawley)

In the blackly comic wedding space of ‘celebration’ all traditional structures of society were subverted. Church, State, family and marriage, they were all under attack and exposed as false icons. Fouéré’s entrance as Hester in the world of ‘others’ (or was it her own world?) in her ‘spoiled’ and ‘unfit’ dress ultimately defied and disrupted the ideology of the established order. This was no space of celebration: the Hogarth-like image of the long wedding table with its grotesque guests, half awake and half asleep, rested on a shaky ground which burst open on Hester’s sense of exclusion as on ‘the suffering of individuals […and stood] in for the shifting of a floor of a whole civilization’.¹³⁹

The destabilizing effect that Carr’s dramaturgy and Frawley’s powerful stage design remade the relationship between the performers’ space and the audience space as a two-way mirror in which the interplay of perspectives, like in an optical game, created a multiplicity of focus.

It can’t be forgotten that the re-workings of the fictional and physical reality of the theatre space in achieving these de-framings of experience was taking place on the Abbey stage, the National Theatre in Ireland, which, in Garry Hynes’ words, is ‘one of the hottest stages in the world because of the link between it and the growth of the country”¹⁴⁰. In view of this, one can’t help seeing the political and ideological significance of such a transformation in the representation of the relationship between woman and home/homeland as offered by the 1998 production of By the Bog of Cats… in the Abbey, by tradition a male site of theatrical expression. As Victoria White has noted, it ‘recreated the Abbey stage as a national stage and fearlessly put women at the centre of it”¹⁴¹.

Not all critics have been positively impressed by the play. Victor Merriman and Bruce Stewart, for instance, exploring in different articles the political resonances of the play for an Abbey audience, have seen the piece as conservative, reactionary and supportive of a new bourgeois Irish mentality¹⁴². Such critical responses illustrate how the playing of women’s experiences and of other less represented groups is usually welcomed as innovative and subversive when it is acted out within alternative theatrical structures. However, when experiences of ‘otherness’ get inside the structures of official power, (for such is the role of the Abbey Theatre in Ireland), they become differently charged.

Here is a play, in the official space of the national stage, woman-authored, and where the main female character is a traveller – metaphor of the definitive outsider; here is a play where the main action unfolds in an open space (no domestic centre, but a realm of limitless possibility) and where the only glimpse of an inside space as home is completely dismembered and mocked. These are attributes that pose perhaps more than one question. Is this not a move irreversibly progressing towards an alternative theatrical image of nationhood, which is less recognizable and self-explanatory, more fragmented, complex and open to what has always been on the borders in Ireland? Does it not foreground a notion of the National Theatre as freed from the threat of becoming ‘hostage to one or other version of being Irish’ (Hynes, p.207)? And does this not more broadly revise the notion of what Ireland as homeland is or perhaps what Ireland as homeland no longer is for women? Virginia Woolf’s quote from Three Guineas significantly continues ‘As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’ (Woolf, p.197).

V

What happens when the telling and powerful visual image enhanced by the original production of By the Bog of Cats… is transferred by a non-Irish company to a non-Irish stage, into a completely different country and culture? Does it lose its political and ideological connections because of the trans-national move, or paradoxically, does the move reinforce them?

In the tall, stark and cold stage re-presentation designed by Joe Vanĕk for the West Coast premiere of By the Bog of Cats… at the San Jose Repertory Theatre under the direction of Timothy Near (with Holly Hunter in the role of Hester Swane), abstractedness, verticality, angularity and free associations re-imagine the physical locations of an Irish land and its native traditions. The characters’ costumes seemed to temporally locate the dramatis personae in an ambiguous somewhere between the 1950s and the 1970s and Hunter’s Hester was in Vanĕk’s words a ‘reborn hippie’¹⁴³. In reply to a question about the Irishness of his decor Vanĕk remarked:

It was as Irish as it could be, given that I am a half English/half Czech living in Ireland and interpreting Ireland for an American director who was very specific in wanting something.

In his artistic vision, the haunted and haunting bog land was an impressive ‘architectural void’, a wasteland where, like in ‘Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, nobody ever arrives and nobody ever leaves’ (Vanĕk). Vanĕk’s place and non-place imploded in height and depth, characterized by a dynamic and diverse exploration of forms, of simplified, basic structures and atmospheric motifs. In this controlling scenic expression, striving towards height and verticality, I couldn’t help thinking of Henry Levefbre’s comment that those co-ordinates ‘have ever been the spatial expression of potentially violent power’¹⁴⁴.

The opening image featured a raked stage space, an ‘open box’ comprised of a flat, furrowed ground of snow and ice and with sides of two revolving panels, sixteen feet high, which, like old bog walls rising into cuts, revealed ‘a more epic, nearly geological cross section, their bases frozen into sheets of crazed ice’ (Vanĕk). On this structure a black curtain, measuring fifty feet, went up, flapping in the wind, with snow falling on it to evoke the form of the bog as well as the brutality of this cold environment – on windy Irish bogs ‘the drying turf is covered with huge sheets of black plastic that snap to the wind’¹⁴⁵.

The image, atmospherically lit, revealed the transient, ancient and powerful presence of this extra character onstage. Most of the bogs in Ireland stretch back thousands of years, and they are all different in shape and size: if in the Midlands they are vast expanses of flat, in the West ‘they rise majestically as angular, cut walls – often the height of a human, and sink into dank, waterlogged ditches’. (Vanĕk)

The shifting quality of Vanĕk’s set, which, as opposed to the horizontal stress of Frawley’s construction, was vertically oriented and reminiscent of Craig’s abstract models of stage settings, unveiled an immediate association between place and female character: when the black curtain went up and the back wall was raised, the ‘open’ frontal box revealed a smaller framing ‘inner’ box with Holly Hunter as Hester Swane coming from inside it, and dragging the black swan downstage onto the snowy field.

The ‘open’, more external box, like Bachelard’s ‘casket’, extended further into the depths of the theatre, to disclose the woman character’s inner realm. The physical and the fictional depth of the stage seemed here to overlap, becoming a transparent metaphor for Hester’s state of mind. Visually, the effect was of a sudden revelation: an unseen world was potently brought onstage and the audience was now being sucked into Hester’s perspective.

That inner boxed landscape that engulfs spectators until the end is also a closed world, hermetically sealed. It takes you all the way from A to Z and never releases you for a moment […] Characters are held captive behind the four walls.’ (Vanĕk).

This last statement could convey the sense that the concept behind the stage composition aimed to recreate a semblance of the four walled structure typical of realist theatre but nothing could be farther from that. Those four walls were completely abstract. Despite the apparent logic of ‘total visibility’ (Chaudhuri, p.27) whereby stage directions were more literally followed and all the spaces mentioned in them – the caravan, the yard and the outside of the house – visualized onstage, Vanĕk’s abstract forms removed the audience’s gaze from any realistic reference. Those forms were architectonic frames, bone structures, exterior shapes completely deprived of any non-essential and naturalistic detail.

Vanĕk’s visual response to the representation of the caravan, for instance, was based on an idea of a traditional travellers’ wagon (maintained in its external form with a set of steps and the seats on the side) but was then completely conceptualized by its skeletal frame, with its arch of frozen glass, reminiscent of motifs from Renaissance sculptural works (Michelangelo’s ‘La Pietà’). The same arched frame was also slightly bloody and rusty, thus visually recalling that conflict in the play’s theme between Catholicism and Paganism, between forces of the established order and the subterranean powers beneath it. For the wedding scene, the whole set changed: very slowly a wall dropped in, trying to stave off the unruly, frosty field of the bog and stretching the action across the forestage. The geometrical wall revealed, at its centre, a carved window with frosty glass, recalling in form the arched frame of the caravan; the rest of the wall presented an ancient Chinese painted motif, an ‘amorphous’ blending of cloudish shades which suggested a visual impression of movement, – ‘the atmospheric movement’ (Vanĕk) – and created a subtle correspondence with the shade motifs on the central window frame. The decision to recreate an indoor space for the scene by no means marked a shift to realistic representation. In this case, it seemed to create a strong sense of visual continuity with the whole conceptual image proposed by Vanĕk’s spatial concept: all the diverse visualized locations emphasized by Near’s production became part of a single yet unfixed continuum, the mutable bog, from which the characters never escaped.

The long wedding table stood on a ground half covered with material whose effect was of greyish cobblestones and half retaining the snowy and icy qualities of the bog field: in spite of the wall, there was no real separateness between the outside and the inside, between public and private space. The suggestiveness of the ‘atmospheric movement’ painted on the wall rendered the latter a frail barrier, a permeable structure, a defenceless means of protection which blurred any divisions and favoured a spreading of forces. The visual presentation had so far exiled all the conventional associations between interior and exterior space, that they were, in this scene, very much in the same realm. The image was an in-between zone, where the distinction between public and private dimensions was erased.

In Vanĕk’s abstract visual composition the isolated figures at the table sat on a wobbly structure thus suggesting a sense of instability and of slowly being drained into the sucking space of the bog or into the understage. These amphibian creatures of the wedding group, (for whom the back wall created no interior, but an undefined and fluid precinct, like in a ‘“Last Supper” image’ (Vanĕk)), formed a pictorial composition that abounded in plastic eloquence. And in Carr’s play, this is the last supper indeed, as no other meal will be consumed before the tragic final resolution.

Unlike Leonardo’s painting, however, where Jesus provided the centre of the visual image, here Hester, as the female Christ figure and the controlling visual trope of the play, had been taken out of the picture. As a witness to the wedding scene brought much closer, the viewer’s gaze experienced a sense of existential dislocation and of a power vacuum. The architectural frame of the back wall could then be seen – appropriating Belsey’s Lacanian assertion on architecture – ‘as a way of enclosing emptiness […and] containing a void’¹⁴⁶. The architectural structure tried to close in upon the menacing vacancy of the human condition in a failed attempt to keep it in place.

Disrupting the unified visual centre of the image, the designer’s composition displayed representations that were drained of fixed and absolute signification. The hegemonic occupancy of that critical space was interrogated: with Hester/Hunter re-entering the wedding party (‘crawling in’ in Vanĕk’s words) and dismantling the male space of legitimacy, the stage was transformed into a realm of instability and visual disorder. Four white dresses were onstage and two audiences were watching – the Fellinian wedding guests onstage, and the audience in the playhouse as the offstage guests to the wedding. Thus the stage was remade as a location of refracted images, in a breakdown of conventional oppositions that had traditionally defined sanctified structures of social power. Through this multiplicity of images – each of the brides onstage were ironically as much legitimated as the other – the stage picture became a visual metatext to Hester’s spoken claim: ‘this is my weddin’ day be rights and not wan of yees can deny it. And yees all just sit there glarin’ as if I’m the guilty one.’ (BBOC, p.54).

In terms of theatrical space and visual image, the transposing of a play from culture to culture requires, on the scenographer’s part, an attempt to disclose ‘differentness’ to the onlooker. For the viewer, then, the act of perceiving becomes an attempt at making that experience of ‘differentness’, with its own particular memory and associations, part of her/his world of experience.

In Vanĕk’s visual response, that sense of ‘differentness’ was never compromised but heightened and deepened. In Vanĕk’s re-focalization of the vision for a non-Irish audience, none of the play’s political and ideological connections – so resonant on the stage of the Abbey – were lost. American audiences were faced with a scenic image of an Irish location which embodied an empowering association between female subject and landscape. It was a visual physicalization of the woman character’s inward dimension, that vast realm of the mind that is buried between the conscious and the unconscious.

Such a visual critique defied the limiting paradigms of nationhood as male, unitary and indivisible. It emphasized the possible co-existence of contrasting visual images: framework and deviation, centre and border, absence and presence, unity and multiplicity, advancing and yielding, rising and falling, all became equally important components of the same broader image.

VI

In the Irish Repertory North American premiere of By the Bog of Cats…, produced in Chicago in 2001, directed by Kay Martinovich and designed by Michelle Habeck, (with Tracy Michelle Arnold in the role of Hester Swane), the guiding principle in the scenic transposition seemed to be in line with Mies van der Rohe’s dictum ‘less is more’¹⁴⁷. A simplified platform stage provided a flexible space and became a visual commentary on the thematic flow of the play.

What was particularly striking from an audience’s perspective was the semi-dark, utterly empty expanse of monochrome greyish flatness that – with the exception of a few selected props – occupied the full extension of the platform stage. Shafts of light partly infused the stage surface with the snowy and frozen appearance of a winter landscape. Such a visualization, characterized by bareness and sparseness, seemed to be completely and interestingly at odds with the logic of ‘total visibility’ adopted by the San Jose production.

Habeck’s stark dematerialization of the Irish physical location was rested on an adaptable oblong thrust-shaped structure, with three distinct playing areas symbolizing the caravan, the yard and, most extensively, the bog. The bog became a shadowy, contourless, protruding area that encapsulated characters and audience: the bog was around, below and within.

The deployment of the thrust stage – a stage unenclosed by any frame that projects forward from its background and is open to the spectators on three of its sides – achieved here some major effects. The main one was to bring the audience space menacingly close to the performers’ space leaving both unsafe and unprotected. There was a strong sense of this fluid stage image moving forward and coming closer to the onlooker both physically and metaphorically. Due to this emphasis on proximity, the true focus of the composition became not its ground but the figures on it, as performers were being drawn closer in what was the theatrical equal of a cinematic close-up. Two small lights on the black back wall of the stage (like cat’s eyes) softened the harshness of the designer’s spatial solution. They functioned as two small openings or fissures through which we and they, spectators and performers, were being looked at throughout the unfolding of the performance. Furthermore, they extended the spectator’s visual field and the characters’ fictional world beyond the confines of the stage into an invisible but contiguous offstage realm of hidden energies and unspoken meanings.

Stage and auditorium could have achieved an effect of wholeness if the raked auditorium had not kept in place the separation between the two areas of the theatre space, thus reminding the onlookers of the stage’s mythical dimension and its connection to Greek tragedy: we, as the spectators/Gods, were watching the performers/characters/humans from above.

Habeck’s visual metaphor of enveloping bleakness and formlessness – reminiscent of a Beckettian limbo space – conjured up rawness and primitiveness but also captured the fluid emotional geography of the landscape, its unresolved and irresolvable ambiguity as a place poised between dark and light, real and surreal, ordinary and extra-ordinary, outward and inward. Through the interplay of light and shadow, the stage surface acquired at one moment the elemental quality of a fossilized ground, invested with the actions and the emotions played on it, and at another moment it shifted to suggest an unlived-on amniotic surface, unmarked by experience. Habeck’s scenic response evoked an image as mutable and multifaceted as the main woman subject in the play. It became a visual extension of Hester’s closeness to other spaces and possibilities, of the interrelated presence of light and dark in her personality. As she says to Caroline Cassidy at a certain point in the play:

[…] there’s two Hester Swanes, one that is decent and very fond of you […]. And the other Hester, well, she could slide a knife down your face, carve ya up and not bat an eyelid. (BBOC, p.30)

With regard to this dynamic interaction of female subject and environment a very telling visual image is established at the very outset of the play, when the disquieting figure of Tracy Michelle Arnold as Hester Swane emerged from the smoky upstage for the ritual of the burial of Blackwing, the black swan. Arnold’s well physicalized act of cutting and opening the frozen turf to make space for the broken body of the bird revealed at once emotional turbulence and vulnerability. It appeared as a physical and symbolic act of ‘occupation’, a struggle to assert a(n) (under)world shelter which could secure for her visual counterpart – the black swan – a personal space. This perturbing act reverberated as a haunting mark throughout the performance. At the end of the play everything that belonged to Hester/Arnold in her dramatic life will be re-claimed into the sucking space of the bog hole.

Habeck’s thrust-out platform seemed to present some problems for the staging of the wedding scene. Ideally, the radical choice of a thrust stage would appear appropriate and particularly convincing for conveying the sense of exposure and human collapse that the scene requires. Practically, instead, it worked less successfully than it did for the rest of the performance. Because of the complete lack of any physical boundary, the dinner table seemed rather randomly positioned and the actors – despite their efforts – appeared to struggle in their movements and groupings in the performing space. The making of meaning was then affected in that scene: the dominant image was visually confusing and Hester’s focal confrontation didn’t have the impact it could have had. From an audience perspective the stage space became, all of a sudden, too populated, the table overpowered the rest of the space – the bog; the conflict of forces and power relations was obliterated along with the tone of grotesque tragi-comedy. It was as if the physical arrangement of Habeck’s scenic solution, totally exposing characters and actions to the viewers, had paradoxically flattened the main significance of the scene, that is, the sense of human disintegration and breakdown.

Though we are talking about space, I believe Brecht’s point about illusion could be apt here: his realization that to break the illusion it is necessary first to re-create an illusion exemplifies my point about the effect of a total exposure¹⁴⁸. The absence of any barriers may have obstructed the possibility of experiencing a stronger atmosphere of breakdown, a visual sense of conflictual forces being torn to shreds.

The concerns expressed above with regard to the wedding scene didn’t spoil the overall success of the production’s conceptual stage image. The designer’s visual strategy of a dematerialized setting, conceived more as a place of interiority rather than a physical reality, communicated double-edgedness and complexity despite sparseness and economy of design. Completely stripped to its bare essentials, Habeck’s bleak rendering channelled the audience’s focus to the actors’ corporeality, pointing primarily to that of Hester/Arnold. The actress’ dominant presence mapped the symbolic topography of the performance: it brought forward the multiplicity of Hester’s spatial experience and the self-division of her human journey. Her movement across the non-representational areas of the designer’s scenic arrangement evoked for the spectators an alternative and uncomfortable vision of an Irish home/homeland which, in conflict with traditional cultural expectations, re-integrated lost aspects and dimensions of the self.

VII

Given the multiple visual possibilities conjured up by each production’s unique theatrical vision, it seems to me that there is something more to Irish theatre than just ‘words’. Besides, the three productions’ alternative uses of theatrical space and visual images have proved the boundless possibilities within physically limited confines.

In the diverse and unique realizations of the Irish bog, the designers’ stage expressions explored in this article all seem to reinforce the aesthetic of resistance of By the Bog of Cats… to fixed and exclusionist notions of home/homeland. All of the three theatrical re-presentations also deployed platform structures that broke with the proscenium frame, be it in a more or less radical form. This makes visual the exigency implicit in Carr’s dramatic design, of getting rid of the picture frame – the fractured shell of domesticity for women characters in theatrical realism – and of moving towards theatre as a place of openness, as an unframed canvas where spectator and performer can attain a more direct and intimate communication.

The three scenographers’ conceptual images, moving away from any realistic re-presentation, foregrounded theatrical locations characterized by inclusiveness, open-endedness, non-linearity and multi-dimensionality. As Jaroslav Malina has put it, ‘stage design, just as other areas of national culture, seeks its own national identity‘¹⁴⁹. In the hybridity of our current world this becomes a space of impossibility if thought of according to dogmatic and inherited categories of interpretation. Through an idea of stage design willing to move beyond the stiffness of a realistic representation, as the three productions in the difference of their visual strategies achieve, an alternative and fragmented notion of Ireland as home/homeland could emerge for woman and man. This notion is more of a possible and open space, whose boundaries are permeable and provisional and whose identity is in a constant state of flux, being continually (re)-invented and (re)-negotiated.

Carr’s Hester Swane transgresses the normative categories of the established system. Through Hester’s re-claimed sense of ownership, and feeling at home in the vast and uncircumscribed space of the bog, and in her moving amid a plurality of varied and less traditionally defined female spaces, Carr’s implosive dramaturgy of space and the set designers’ different artistic transpositions encourage the spectator to suspend the old habit of seeing the relationship between space and gender as responding to immutable and unshakeable laws. Their re-presentations envisage a re-made image-concept of an Irish home/homeland for women characters as one containing within it many diverse and even incompatible places. It becomes more of an inward place, an inner condition, ‘a state of the mind’ (Devlin, p.119).

This shift in perception inevitably dislodges assumed ideas of belonging and identity for women: an expanded idea of subjectivity seems to take shape and new notions of self and ‘other’ step forward.

Through Carr’s theatrical imagination and through the artistic vision of theatre practitioners, the Midlands now inhabits a theatrical present at the intersection between places, ‘a metaphor for the crossroads between the worlds’¹⁵⁰, a symbol of other spaces.

Extract From: The Theatre of Marina Carr: “before rules was made”, edited by Cathy Leeney & Anna McMullan (2003)

Cross Reference: Following essays on Carr, plus other essays by Fitzpatrick, McMullan and others

See Also: Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices By Women In Ireland, edited by Miriam Haughton and Mária Kurdi and Performing Feminisms in Contemporary Ireland, edited by Lisa Fitzpatrick