Journeys in Performance: On Playing in The Mai and By the Bog of Cats…

Olwen Fouéré interviewed by Cathy Leeney and Anna McMullan

Q: Can you compare the experience of, for instance, playing the Salomé you created in Steven Berkoff’s production of Wilde’s play (at the Gate Theatre), with that of playing The Mai, or Hester in By the Bog of Cats…? Does Carr create a different structure around her heroines so that the play belongs to them?

A: To take the example of Salomé, the difference for me would be similar to the difference between representation and actuality. Or the difference between the performer and the actor. These are fine distinctions, which describe significant differences from my point of view. As Salomé, I would have described myself as a performer, in a highly stylized work, representing Salomé. Of course, at a certain point, these distinctions must break down. It would be part of my job to allow the Salomé I was representing into actuality, like a sort of transsubstantiation, or at least to invite her in at some point. As Hester or The Mai, the task was not so much to create a persona, but rather to find ways of stepping into these women. Hester in particular was already there in front of me. I just needed to step into her. Her inner world was a furnace, and I had no questions about her. We became as one, and I never felt I had to tell the audience anything about her, because she was already so alive. It took me longer to find The Mai, but I had the same experience of stepping into her once she was in front of me. I did not feel the same need to craft the performances in an aesthetic sense as I would with something like Salomé, or with a number of other roles where you’re maybe representing something more iconic. Hester is a very mythic character, archetypal in a sense, but I wasn’t conscious at all of operating within an archetype. I felt I was living within a person, a role, in which, how can I describe it, the energies were very primal, which I suppose is really what archetypes are about. I didn’t feel any need to construct the roles in playing The Mai or Hester; it was about stepping into them. I don’t have an answer to ‘Does Carr create a different structure around her heroines?’ except that, for instance, Oscar Wilde’s play is called Salomé, but the central figure in the play is really Herod, and Salomé is almost like another side of Herod. Marina allows her heroines to remain central and to totally devour the universe, to rip the fabric of the world around them. Playing them, I never felt like a function of the play. Maybe it’s because Marina is a woman, and is writing with a woman in a central role, but I certainly feel that her heroines are extremely central. With Tom Hickey as Red Raftery in On Raftery’s Hill, Marina’s first male protagonist, it’s his world. He had that same licence to devour the world around him.

Q: What aspects of Carr’s dramatic language interest you or challenge you as a performer?

A: I will speak later about how important the dialect is, the sound of the language, that it has a music which operates on the performer’s psyche, as well as on the audience’s psyche, which is beyond words really. Her use of language reminds me to a certain extent of Synge. When you read Synge’s language off the page you think ‘God, this is an extraordinary construction of images’, but in fact he would say that much of what he wrote he heard through the floorboards when he’d be writing in Wicklow, with girls in the kitchen downstairs, or phrases he’d heard on the Aran Islands or whatever. He would probably claim, as Marina has claimed, that the best stuff he wrote was reported speech. Marina’s language has a similar poetic magic and it is also very grounded. There is an innate humour too in her language – even in the throes of her tragedies there’s a wonderful sort of Beckettian humour and a wild exultation in it. Her language is quite exultant I would say. And the chance to work with that kind of language is both a gift and a challenge to any actor.

Q: Your response to By the Bog of Cats…? What was it initially, and did it change over time?

A: My initial response to the script was a very powerful one. I remember reading an early draft – not the penultimate draft, but the one before that – when Hester was called Angel – I remember reading it and finishing it in bed one morning, and when I got to the end I experienced a very powerful physical release. I remember being in floods of tears. I knew that the play had hit me in a very deep place, and it also seemed to articulate something that I had never fully articulated in anything I’d done before. Some deep grief to do with … yes, some deep grief. I think that deep feeling of grief was brought on by the seamless transition in the play from the intensely personal to the hugely mythic. And the power of this juxtaposition of the detailed and the local against the mythic is that it is not a single action. It’s an accumulation of actions which you experience as you’re reading or playing. This peaks during the sequence in the final moments of the play. When Josie doesn’t want to be left alone, she begs her mother, pleading, ‘Take me with you’, and it is in order to comfort her that Hester kills her. It is the loving nature of that gesture from Hester, and something about that ‘Take me with you’ that I find extraordinarily touching, the idea that someone asks to travel with you into death.

My response to the character Angel/Hester was immediate. I immediately connected to her. I felt the greatest difficulty would be to give her a quiet place because the fire of her rage was so hot, and I knew my task would be to contain that rage in some way. Not to repress it but to contain it so that it could burn all the way through two and a half hours, or whatever length the show would be and not to let it burn out too fast. The characters in the play are uncivilized, they have a savage quality. They cut across all the boundaries, and this makes them funny as well. Those were my initial responses to the script and they didn’t actually change. When I read the next two drafts and when we started rehearsing, I felt very much the same about the script and the character.

Q: Hester is at once a passionate person, and a mythic figure from Greek tragedy. Does this yoking together relate to your work in the part?

A: Yes, it does of course. You’re dealing with very primal energies, the stuff of myth. I believe that all those Greek mythic figures are classical archetypes, and are representations of the primal energies within us. They are an embodiment of those energies and that’s why they survive through time. They’re in our DNA, in our physical, spiritual, and psychic DNA. As I said, Hester was there in front of me and I just needed to step into this person who was like a furnace inside, but who was exultant within it as well.

Q: How did you work on the dialogues with the ghosts and with Catwoman?

A: I worked on the dialogues with the ghost characters and with the ‘real’ characters in a similar way. When Hester speaks with the Ghost Fancier, she quickly realizes that he is a form of ghost, but it doesn’t particularly alter her conversation with him, except insofar as her curiosity is aroused and she begins to engage more fully. Her last line as he leaves is ‘Come back. I can’t die. I have a daughter’ – recognizing that, in some way, his appearance is a warning that she has one day left to complete her life. I love how the Ghost Fancier is confused by mortal time and gets his dawn and his dusk mixed up!

The Catwoman I regarded very much as a ‘real’ or local character, who is the midwife or the local witch in the community. I don’t know whether those people exist in communities in rural Ireland still. To a certain extent they must. As we know, midwives over the last few centuries were also the healers and the witches. Hester knows that Catwoman tells the truth. A lot of the other characters don’t. The truth in the deepest sense.

The appearance of Joseph’s ghost at the beginning of Act Three and Hester’s conversation with him is the dialogue that disturbs her the most and that scene was the most difficult part of the play from my point of view. I think it was problematic for all of us to find the arc of that scene and I think it was re-written quite a few times during the four week rehearsal period.

Q: How was Monica Frawley’s set [for the Abbey production of By the Bog of Cats…] to work in?

A: I found it a superb set. It was classical, stripped down. It was as empty as the bog. It created a mythic space for the play to exist in, and it demanded a nakedness from us on the stage. There was some talk about whether there should be a caravan on the set. In the San Jose production apparently, there was a caravan at several different moments, but I think that the nakedness of our set was right. Also, when I felt the need to mark Hester’s more personal territory, as opposed to her larger landscape, I established it by choosing the stage right side, which I imagined to be the steps of the caravan. Monica reinforced this for me by putting stuff around that area, and when I went off stage right, that was the inside of the caravan. So, reading the image of the stage from stage left to stage right, as the audience does, Hester’s territory begins stage left (the house) and ends on stage right (the caravan). The stage left area is dominant, since it’s known to be where an audience looks first. So you could theorize that, at the beginning of the play, the audience and the people from the town share the same world (stage right), and Hester is the intruder on stage left. But Hester’s territory moves to stage right, drawing the audience with her, so towards the end of the play Hester shares her world with the audience, and the people from the town all enter from the dominant stage left. Hester never really left that stage right side towards the end as the world of the town came in on her, driving her out. In all those final moments, for instance in that final exchange with Xavier Cassidy, it was very useful for me to be able to cling to that side of the stage, until the Ghost Fancier releases Hester in death. Yes, I think the set expressed and released the mythic dimension of the piece, and the mythic dimension of Hester’s space.

Q: How did you manage the dialect in By the Bog of Cats…?

A: I could see how important the dialect was. When I did The Mai, it was written in straight English, (with the exception of Grandma Fraochlán), not in dialect form, and the sound of The Mai, the sound of the characters in The Mai was not at all as crucial as it was in By the Bog of Cats… The dialect form is a departure that Marina undertook with Portia Coughlan, where all of her characters speak with this very particular sound, and it’s essential that they speak with that sound. The music of the piece is crucial. I was very anxious to get that right in By the Bog of Cats… because I feel it is the key to a number of things that are lurking underneath the language. It is certainly one of the keys to the primal energy that drives Hester, and many of Marina’s characters. So what I did was a lot of listening. I was rehearsing another play in Edinburgh before I started rehearsing By the Bog of Cats… in Dublin, and I flew over one weekend in order to spend some time with Marina and asked if I could record her saying some of the lines for me, so that I could listen back to the tape and start getting the sound into my head. She also gave me a few guidelines and mentioned certain people who could speak like that. So I think I pretty much had the music of it by the time I came in to day one of rehearsals. When we did the first readings I would simply stop and repeat the sentence if I felt that my sound wasn’t right. So I managed the dialect by a lot of preparation beforehand, and by the time I got into rehearsal if I lost the sound it would throw me off my track completely. It was an essential part of the performance. Because the part of your body that this sound needs to come from is a very resonant gut place, the audience then receives the sound in that gut place; (Artaud often talked about this). By the end of By the Bog of Cats…, Hester lets out a cry of grief. It was an extension of the sounds I’d been using all evening, so it wasn’t hard to go to that place. Marina has talked about the charge the characters must carry, and how playwriting is not about the beautiful sentence. Much of this charge, this unspoken information which the audience receives is through the dialect.

Q: What were the most difficult moments in rehearsal?

A: The rehearsal period was short and intense. It was four weeks, which is very short for a new play. A lot of new plays get more time than that. It so happened that four weeks was all we had, so I don’t remember the most difficult moments [laughing] because it was full on and I never stopped and I don’t think I ever had a break – I was on stage for so much of the time. I knew that I could access the end scene, when I would have to murder my child, and so I didn’t experience any difficulty about it but I was aware that I had to maintain a trust in myself – that I could tap into that place every time. And Patrick [Mason] was wonderful. I remember a couple of times drawing towards the close of the play when the whole thing would get to me and I would be a bit shaky afterwards, Patrick would come and put his arm around me and we’d have a bit of a laugh, and it was fine. Then there was a period when we started running the play where I realized I was in some sort of overdrive. I was going too fast and it all started to sound the same, at the same pitch. That comes from not properly containing the rage and the drive that I was talking about earlier on (where I knew that was going to be one of my tasks). So when we started running it I was thinking ‘Oh my god, it’s all up there. What am I going to do?’ And Marina and I went out for a meal that night and she gave me a few pointers. She said, yes, you are overdriving it. Just take your time here and there, and she gave me a few pointers like that. Initially, it was hard to avoid overdriving because of the amount of emotional baggage that I was carrying in order to work through the piece, so it was a question of applying a conscious degree of craft to contain it, and to modulate it a little bit more. I suppose that was the most difficult aspect of the rehearsal period, but it was a joyous time because I knew I was being given an opportunity that was rare. I don’t think they come around that often – those kinds of roles.

Q: Why does Hester kill her child as well as herself?

A: In my view Hester kills her child as an act of love. Her child wants to come with her. Her child is otherwise going to enter a world that Hester feels is worse than death. But she certainly does not kill her child as an act of revenge, which is what some people seem to regard the classical Medea as doing. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with that. I think revenge is a very reductive way of putting it. It has nothing to do with revenge. It has to do with love.

Q: Why does Hester cling to Carthage?

A: She clings to Carthage because she loves Carthage. He’s also the father of her child, and he’s her only connection really to the world outside. And it is he who has left her, so of course she clings.

Q: If you were to direct someone else as Hester, what would you be looking for?

A: That’s a difficult one. I would be looking for Hester’s dark energy. You usually recognize fairly quickly the people who have it and who have to live with it. Somebody who can see the world at its most reduced and primal and who is in touch with those very primal passions: love, sex, death. Someone who is capable of seeing Hester’s murder of her child, and her own suicide, as being born out of great passion, great love, not out of any kind of retaliation. It’s interesting that there are a number of people who find that idea very difficult, particularly women. So I suppose if I was to direct somebody I would be looking for someone who would understand that, the heat of those passions. After that I would be looking for a certain animal energy. I think that’s all tied up with Hester’s way, that you’ve got to see that feral, animal quality. I don’t think Marina titled the play By the Bog of Cats… without a reason. I think there’s a certain feline grace to Hester, and to the way that she is with her child. I would also look for somebody who was very respectful of the kind of music that is necessary for the delivery of the language.

Q: Do you think the bond between mothers and daughters is the main theme of The Mai?

A: Actually I don’t feel that. Nor do I think those bonds are the most powerful. I think the most powerful drive in The Mai is the belief and the longing for everything that is exotic and unattainable. That’s in one of Millie’s speeches, about Grandma Fraochlán’s Moroccan or Spanish father, a passing sailor, ‘[w]hoever he was, he left Grandma Fraochlán his dark skin and a longing for everything that was exotic and unattainable’ (p.116). I think that longing is a huge part of The Mai. And she reaches for it through Robert. She’s fairly uninterested in her daughter, in her children. There’s something about how she can access her creative power through her sexuality and her relationship with Robert which is her portal to a higher experience. On the other hand, in By the Bog of Cats…, Hester’s relationship with Carthage is hugely significant, but her relationship with her dead mother and her own relationship with her daughter Josie are the most powerful links. Her mother is also associated with the bog, which is one of the reasons why Hester doesn’t want to leave it. If she stays on the bog, she believes she will find her mother again and be reunited with her. If Hester were to die, her terror is that Josie will look for her all her life; that once she goes, Josie will repeat her own anguish. So she takes Josie with her.

Q: What makes home for The Mai or Hester?

A: I think the bog is home for Hester because it’s also her lost mother, which explains how, although she’s the daughter of a traveller, she has no desire to leave where she is. Home for The Mai is the house that she has created for Robert. That’s home. It’s something that she tries to build, tries to make, and it’s left empty and will never be filled.

Q: What were the reactions of audiences to The Mai and By the Bog of Cats…?

A: There were two I particularly recall. Firstly, during The Mai, I remember the extent to which people, particularly women, felt that The Mai was so hard done by by Robert, and that he was completely the villain of the piece. That always surprised me because I feel that The Mai herself has a strange sort of middle class thing of wanting the perfect home, and she associates her sense of being with the bricks and mortar of this house that she has built for Robert. And there were aspects of her that would certainly have driven me away if I’d been Robert. So I was quite interested by the fact that so many women saw her as being hard done by, and saw him as being absolutely the villain. It was fascinating to me that some women, after the show, couldn’t look at or speak to the actor who played Robert, and that they saw The Mai as this great victim. Both actors (Owen Roe and Robert O’Mahoney) were very interested in playing the part, but audience reactions against the character were strong. There’s always a filter through which an audience sees a production; there were couples sitting watching the play, the men were embarrassed and squirming, and the women were turning to them and saying, ‘Now, see, that’s how it is’. I don’t think Robert is necessarily underwritten, but it’s a difficult role to play. The negative reactions are to do with the stereotypes that audiences bring. Identification with The Mai means there is a reaction against Robert, but look at Grandma Fraochlán – there’s so much damage coming from there, from lots of places.

Most people had a very powerful response to the row scene between The Mai and Robert, which I think is brilliantly written, a truly authentic lovers’ rage between the two of them. Articulating that kind of female rage is a huge part of Marina’s work. I don’t know if any other writer in Ireland has confronted it with the same authenticity. At times I feel that she is actually articulating the female rage of the nation. The row scene in The Mai functions like the dance scene in Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. It is a moment of dionysian release. The more enraged they both get, the more exultant they become. The exultation is almost like reverse love-making. You could feel it from the audience, that gasp at the back of the throat, and ‘Oh god, I know this.’ The scene was full of sexual energy. Hester Swane’s rage is a bigger thing. By the Bog of Cats… is also a deeply political play about the outsider. Carthage is not just marrying another woman; he’s entering this land-grabbing, gombeen society. So that Hester’s rage is also a cultural rage, of a colonized culture which is being driven out, not allowed to exist, and where her sexuality and creativity are being suppressed.

The other reaction that I recall was during By the Bog of Cats… I found it extraordinary how people could not accept that Hester murders her child at the end. One woman came up to me afterwards and said ‘But she’s deranged’. I said ‘How do you mean?’ She said ‘She’s deranged. She kills her child.’ I said she doesn’t kill her child because she’s deranged. She doesn’t have to be mad. And there were a couple of other women whose comments I heard at second hand who felt that I hadn’t played her mad enough, that Medea had to be mad because she kills her children. I think this is a very reductive way of looking at it.

Q: What do you think are the contrasts or the links between your work in Carr’s plays, and your work in Operating Theatre? Does Carr influence you as a writer? Do both types of work feed each other?

A: First, I wouldn’t even begin to compare or link or contrast my work in Marina’s plays and my work in Operating Theatre. They’re very different things. When I work in Marina’s plays I regard myself as an actor, one hundred per cent. When I work in Operating Theatre, that’s where I become a performer.

Marina’s influence on me as a writer? I wish! No, I don’t really regard myself as a writer for a start. I would regard myself as a ‘theatre artist’, I suppose, if I were to try to define in broad terms what I do in Operating Theatre and other work of that nature. Even if I have written the stuff, I do not quite see it as writing, because I’m writing with my body and with images, I’m not so much writing words on a page which illumine the path for somebody else. If I did begin to write as a playwright or novelist, I’ve no idea where my influences would be. But if Carr’s influence were in there I’d be delighted.

Q: As a performer/actor do both types of work feed one another?

A: Very much so. The work that I make, and the work that I work with are two streams of my life that run parallel and nourish one another. The work that I do as an actor in the theatre in general develops my craft, my openness to other ideas, and my love of the ensemble. Whereas my work with the likes of Operating Theatre, which is ‘my own’ work, is lonelier and less accessible for a lot of people, it does develop my creative courage, a certain fearlessness in me I suppose, and it develops my hunger for travelling that world of imagination, that country that we call the imagination. Having to travel there alone is a very good thing.

Coda

Looking back on my work in The Mai and By the Bog of Cats… a couple of images have formed around the sense of difference between the writer and the actor, what makes one, and what makes the other. If imagination is a country, then Marina’s maps bring me to a stretch of land and water that I recognize. The interior landscape of the bog, the colours of rage and passionate love. This place is dark, deep and conversant with the world at its most reduced and primal, a place of great anguish and great exultation: twin truths that rise and fall with parallel intensity.

If imagination is a country it is as infinite as the cosmos in its dimensions. The playwright goes there utterly alone, and returns with a map. The actor, equipped with the map, sets off once more, for the most part travelling alone although in close communication with her fellow actors, to that eternally undiscovered country. Perhaps they both die and come back reborn, who knows, but each task certainly brings us a little closer to our death. The writer gives her map to the actor, the words illumine the path, blazing a trail through to the next encounter, or pathway, or river, or dead-end.

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

Cross Reference: Section on Olwen Fouéré’s work.

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