Dead Center

Dead Center: Tragedy and the Reanimated Body in Marina Carr's The Mai and Portia Coughlan
Doyle, Maria.

Modern Drama, Volume 49, Number 1, Spring 2006, pp. 41-59 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press DOI: 10.1353/mdr.2006.0048

For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mdr/summary/v049/49.1doyle.html

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Dead Center: Tragedy and the Reanimated Body in Marina Carr’s The Mai and Portia Coughlan
MA RI A D OY LE

If, as Martin Esslin argues, the actor’s body is the “iconic sign par excellence: a real human being who has become a sign for a human being” (56), what happens to an audience’s experience of the theatrical event when the central such sign of the drama, the body of the hero, “dies” in the middle of the play? “A corpse on stage” quite obviously “demands attention” (Swander 139), much more so when the corpse in question is that of the title character. Yet a dead body on stage, which is, after all, not in fact dead, can be reanimated, and doing so, either through a disruption of linearity or through the dramatic presentation of an afterlife, testifies to the vitality and malleability of the theatrical experience. In attempting to represent “death,” the bodily sign implies a chronological endpoint, a culminating stillness that provokes analytical engagement: like the conclusion of any motion, “the stillness thus draws […] the attention of the spectator […] and calls for some effort either of aesthetic appreciation or interpretation” (McAuley 106–07). Stillness and motion define one another, and later motions of the “revived” body must always be read though the audience’s remembrance of the character’s ultimate conclusion, as if the theatrically animated figure becomes a trace of its own imaginatively extinguished self. It is precisely this approach that the Irish dramatist Marina Carr makes use of in her early tragedies. Both of the plays that solidified her reputation – The Mai (1994) and Portia Coughlan (1996) – display their heroines’ corpses at the midpoint of the action, only to break with linearity in the latter portion of the play by retracing the steps that led to that demise. Carr’s goal in crafting these plays was to “write a classical tragedy [imbued with] the Greek idea of destiny and fate and little escape” (Clarity), and, while displaying the body mid-action certainly forecloses escape as an option, it also circumvents traditional tragic structure by defining the nature of the disaster, not as prophecy or potentiality but as a given, before we have a clear understanding of the
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motives and circumstances that generate that catastrophic event. Carr’s resistance in these plays to making death a literal endpoint prevents both pieces from providing the emotional release that generally accompanies our witnessing of the hero’s final downfall and his commemoration by the community: heroic destruction, followed by communal lament, traditionally provides the resolution of an “absolute close” (Langer 351), a wholeness that is muddied here by the refusal of the body to stay “dead.” Carr’s strategy not only forces the audience to contend more directly with the heroine’s efforts to stave off her own catastrophe, “undo[ing] suspense,” as Clare Wallace puts it, and “focus[ing] attention on the factors contributing to the characters’ destinies” (88), but, by so doing, also throws into focus the imaginative divergence in an audience’s perception of male and female tragic figures. Aware of the potentially melodramatic reading of emotionally driven, selfdestructive women, Carr argues that her decision to break with linearity is an effort to avoid the lesser dramatic label: “If you had the ending of Portia Coughlan at the end, it wouldn’t work. It would be too melodramatic” (qtd. in Murphy 53). Understanding the process of the central figure’s demise is essential to reading the significance of that event, for as Fiona Macintosh notes, tragedy, unique among the genres in dealing with questions of human mortality, places its emphasis on the essential “ante mortem stages” of the hero’s movement into death (39, 42–43), an idea echoed in Carr’s own thinking: “I have always thought that death is just a moment, like two seconds,” she argues, explaining that what “is so important [is] how one dies” (qtd. in Sihra 57, 56). While Carr’s later plays return to a seemingly more traditional linear model, the meaning of these earlier pieces radiates from the sign of the dead female body, forcing the audience to reorient itself in relation to the event – the two seconds – whose triviality is emphasized by its absence from the action of either play: in both cases, the moment of death is itself invisible to the audience, the heroine observed only on either side of the life/death divide. By placing the “dead” body at the structural center of the drama, Carr’s first major successes strive to force a reconsideration of the relationship between tragedy and femininity, leading the observer beyond the icon of the body into a more complex appreciation of the heroine’s character, her dissolution or maturation, in the process of dying. Carr’s interest in the model of Greek tragedy has frequently been noted in critical reviews of her work, and she is not alone in attempting to apply Greek models to contemporary Ireland. Indeed, the Irish interest in classical drama is prevalent enough to have inspired a recent collection, Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy, which seeks to draw together critical perspectives on a wide variety of translations, adaptations, and performances. Marianne McDonald, co-editor of this collection, points out that of Greek plays selected for production, Sophocles’ Antigone stands as “the clear favourite” (McDonald, “The Irish” 52), a fact made more relevant to this discussion by the parallels some critics have drawn between Portia and Sophocles’ hero-

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ine; most importantly, each woman’s absolute allegiance to a dead brother (O’Dwyer 245). Yet Antigone, as touchstone for Ireland’s ability to think of itself as weightily Greek, also reveals a cultural preoccupation with femininity and the potency of female action. In the Greek original, Antigone significantly disappears from the play that bears her name, dying offstage in a way that shifts the focus of the tragedy from the heroine’s foregone conclusion to the male protagonist’s tragic recognition and ultimate destruction. Thus, the Sophoclean realignment of the heroine’s position, from tragic center to catalyst for male self-realization, not only erases the heroine as presence but also offers a storyline easily adaptable to the Irish construct of Cathleen ni Houlihan, the suffering, cajoling, inspiring, but ultimately inactive and remote icon of Irish communal identity: easily grafted onto a variety of sociopolitical contexts, from the Northern conflict to the Republic’s approach to crime,1 Antigone offers yet another means of retelling – and indeed, through its classical cachet, justifying – the abstraction of the feminine that has been so often conceived of as the cornerstone of Irish cultural nationalism. Unlike many others with this interest in raiding the tragic horde of ancient Greece, Carr does not replicate traditional Greek form but instead communicates a sense of intense emotional immediacy by reconfiguring conventional languages of symbol and reference, both Greek and Irish, that allow the texts to resonate beyond any single specific model. In describing the process of crafting Ariel, her most recent play, which is based on The Oresteia, Carr notes, “I suppose I use myth to add another layer – but it’s not something that I consciously do. If it erupts out of the stuff, then well and good. I’m aware that the plot is linked, but then I forget about that and try to write the play” (qtd. in Kilroy), and the parallels between her By the Bog of Cats and Euripides’ Medea were in fact missed by early audiences (Murphy 51). Similarly, Carr’s Portia/Antigone can hardly be offered up as a Cathleen in the making, for this play and its predecessor both begin and end with the heroine’s perspective. These women do not disappear into death or a distant mythic existence but rather communicate with us from the brink of their own demise, significantly speaking for themselves rather than to generate masculine action. Carr has described her break with linearity as a means of “shift[ing] the focus” to allow the deaths to “resonate through the [last] act” (qtd. in Murphy 53), a technique that circumvents traditional form only to demonstrate more intensely the idea, common in Greek tragedy, that the hero must exist simultaneously as absence and presence: as Fiona Macintosh argues, “The cost of tragic status is exclusion from the process of living.[…] Tragic characters […] are absent and present simultaneously not simply because of their proximity to death, but more specifically because of their participation in the process of dying” (78–79). Carr’s women, having died and then been reanimated, stand before an audience as spectral, inherently liminal figures, characters engaged in a transitional motion between states of being.

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“Shift[ing] the focus” is crucial, given that both Portia and The Mai seem drawn in the broad outlines of the melodramatic heroine – dependent, excessively emotional, self-destructive. Both, for instance, opt for a mode of suicide often considered particularly feminine: not only would death by water be read as a passive death – one that happens to the body rather than one that involves the active piercing of the body like shooting or stabbing2 – but the immersion in water can also be read symbolically as a union with a feminine element. Suicide by drowning has been frequently associated with sexually transgressing women, the water serving as a means of “cleansing” their guilt (Larson 21). Significantly, the question of agency arises with the drowning death in ways less likely to surface when other methods are employed. One study of nineteenth century suicides noted that the number of female suicides could not be determined accurately because many drowning deaths could not be labeled conclusively as self-inflicted: had the deceased jumped or slipped (Anderson 44)? Thus, a woman found drowned might be understood as a victim whose apparent lack of conscious intent removed any meaning from her death (save that of her own fragile inability to save herself) or as a sinner who in choosing to drown herself opts for a passive death that might symbolically wash away her gender-related fault. Moreover, both The Mai and Portia Coughlan center on domestic situations involving women who define themselves in relation to men – The Mai has built a house, one far beyond her means, to lure her estranged husband Robert back to her after a five-year absence, while Portia spends fifteen years haunted by her twin brother Gabriel’s ghost, who remains present onstage and whose ethereal singing punctuates the action. The Mai’s end is a response to Robert’s continued and very publicly displayed infidelity, a circumstance that could relegate The Mai’s fall to a typical conception of female action; according to Margaret Higonnet, “The insistent representation of women – rather than men – who commit suicide for love compliments the familiar assumption that woman lives for love, man for himself” (108), one hardly given the lie by The Mai’s actions throughout the play. Portia similarly shows intense devotion to her dead brother, going so far as to claim that they had “just the one [soul] between us and it went into the Belmont River with him” (Carr, Portia, Plays 1 211),3 an assertion made more chilling by the fact that she kills herself in exactly the same spot where Gabriel had disappeared. The women described above, in the context of a staged and scripted action in which something “big” is supposed to happen, might be expected to kill themselves, and if, as Carr has argued, “in a lot of plays, the women are ciphers. […] I try to give them an articulation to express their depths and their contradictions” (qtd. in Hartigan), the audience must be forced into new awareness of them so that those “depths and […] contradictions” can be effectively explored. Ultimately, Carr does throw those seemingly stereotypical character traits into new focus, offering women who are angry, forceful, and

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most importantly, not victims of their worlds but each glaringly complicit in her own demise. Yet understanding how this shift is accomplished requires a sustained examination of how the deaths themselves are framed, for the presentation of, and lament over, the body not only contributes valuable insight into the women themselves but also significantly reveals the character of the world around them. The “dead” body, sign of the hero’s demise, becomes a focus point for our contemplation of the value of this figure, the once dynamic individual reduced in death to an object for our scrutiny. Objects, of course, lack a voice, and the muteness itself generates divergent readings of the masculine or feminine body. As Benjamin reminds us, for the hero, silence becomes a means of expressing the transcendence of the self (108). Yet a silent woman has the potential to generate quite a different reaction. After all, silence has historically been considered a female virtue: in the classical tradition, female silence “confer[s] an ideal air of ‘modesty’ and ‘good sense’” (Griffith 123), and the woman who withholds her speech has often been seen as rightly curbing a tendency towards deficient, incoherent prattle (Ferris 97). Thus, the heroine’s final silence may, rather than allowing her to transcend the self, objectify her into an idealized exemplar of self-effacing “womanhood,” a process complicated in the case of the female suicide. If suicide represents an attempt, as Higonnet terms it, to force “others to read one’s death” (103) by willfully turning a living body into an object, this interpretive act becomes particularly difficult when the doer is, by definition, a “feminine” mystery; a woman’s willful eradication of her own voice risks the appearance of appropriateness. In the moment when their deaths are revealed, both women are, of necessity, silent, but the surrounding frame generates very different readings of the meaning of that stifled speech. The circumstances of The Mai’s death are revealed twice in Act One, once verbally when her daughter Millie relates her memory of the aftermath of her mother’s death and once visually when, at the end of the act, the audience sees, silhouetted in a “ghostly light,” Robert carrying The Mai’s body in his arms (147). The first is definite yet indirect, a reference not to the death itself but to preparations for the wake, thus catching us out as if we had blinked and missed the significant event; as Donald Morse describes it, Millie’s narrative seeks to “establish in the audience a memory of an event which has not yet occurred” so as to replicate the sense of inevitability a Greek audience would have felt at watching characters with whose dark fates they were already familiar (115). The story is brief, the means of The Mai’s death hinted at only through the “watery blue silk” (129) that Millie and Robert select for her funeral garb. “Creating” this memory jars the audience into attention, only to disorient them a second time by the utter normalcy of the staging of the following scene, bathed as it is in “sunshine, cello music, [and the] sound of children playing” (129). The end of the act, however, finds Millie again alone onstage, this time recounting the legend of Owl Lake, the

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site where The Mai has built the house that was supposed to bring Robert home for good. The story she tells of Coillte and Bláth is a tale of a woman’s all-consuming love: when Bláth leaves Coillte for the dark witch, Coillte cries a lake of tears, and when Bláth returns, she has dissolved into the water, her emotional state overpowering her physical self. To this verbal cue is added the image of Robert with The Mai’s drowned body, underscoring the literal fact of her death and offering the suggestion of parallel circumstances. With the literal appearance of the tableaux of Robert and The Mai, the audience must now contend with the “finality” of the dead body itself. Throughout the process of revealing the death, Carr’s juxtaposition of emotional palates keeps the audience engaged with the theatrical event, heightening the tension that leads up to the presentation of The Mai’s corpse. Between Millie’s story of her mother’s death and our visual acknowledgment of it, Carr has inserted an ensemble discussion of what seems a rather mundane family crisis. Coming on the heels of Millie’s revelation, we might expect such a scene to expose the source of The Mai’s downfall, but in fact, it does quite the opposite, for the episode involving the sudden marriage and impending divorce of The Mai’s younger sister Beck seems rather to distance us from Millie’s assertion, both through its length (in the printed edition of the play, the interlude runs to nearly twenty pages) and through the family dynamics it reveals. Beck’s situation occasions the arrival of the aunts Julie and Agnes, who seem poised to serve as the defenders of Catholic morality: Beck will not divorce if they can help it. Yet as the scene progresses, both aunts – first Agnes, overtly, and then Julie somewhat more discreetly – demonstrate a softer, more flexible and accepting side, and the angry bickering that seems to be leading to a disastrous family rupture subsides, leaving in its wake a sense of adaptable normalcy. Such a scenario does much to throw into relief The Mai’s demise, reinforcing as it does the sense that poor romantic choices do not necessarily occasion the end of everything; The Mai could, like Beck, divorce and move on. Ending with Julie pushing two envelopes of money into The Mai’s hands, one for Beck and one for herself, with the words, “There’s plenty more […] where that came from, so don’t ever be stuck. I know you’ve had it rough” (147), the scene presents the possibility that life could continue – for all the generational resentments the episode airs – relatively placidly, sustained by the community of women who bustle through The Mai’s house. To the forty-year-old Mai, her aunt’s offer may seem overly parental, even condescending, but the thought behind the gesture at least is conciliatory and supportive, revealing as it does that, for all her moralistic posturing, Julie was prepared upon arrival to accept Beck’s decision. Presenting The Mai’s death in this series of episodes at the end of Act One raises numerous questions. While the appearance of a dead body at the end of an act may suggest some fleeting sense of closure, Carr’s verbal and visual framing of the corpse befuddles by offering no clear reason for such a drastic

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turn of events. The vibrant optimistic self that comes through in the interlude between Millie’s narrations is, in this moment, reduced to a limp visual object, significantly carried, and thus physically contained, by Robert. Yet he is not the only means of containing The Mai, for in death she cannot explain herself but instead must have the story of her demise told second-hand by the child who is throughout a crucial filter for our perception of the title character: Millie’s continual presence onstage makes the audience aware that the events depicted for us have their origin in her memory. Yet Millie’s story is mythically suggestive – and, in its liebestod proscriptiveness, limiting rather than truly illuminating – and the audience is still left wondering, with the central character dead by intermission, what direction the action might take. The crucial moment occurs in Portia Coughlan much more abruptly, prompting a rather different audience response. Still raising questions about how Portia has come to this point, the appearance of her dead body at the beginning of Act Two offers not even the fleeting sense of closure suggested by The Mai’s death at the end of an act. This image of death throws into disarray our sense of a character whom the first act communicates to us as a forceful speaking subject. Portia is not easily intimidated, and her verbal attacks both resist attempts to silence her and level a critique against social authority and the rituals of human interaction that sustain that system. When her wouldbe lover Fintan offers a romantic dinner to accompany their planned rendezvous, she rejects the proposal, in the process, revealing a talent for reducing emotionally charged, ritualized social exchanges to their essential elements: “[c]an have dinner at home, only want to fuck ya” (208). Portia’s public language suggests a character both self-assured and self-sustaining and indicates her scant respect for any socially sanctioned human connection, whether it be to her parents, to her husband, or even to her children, whose distance from their mother’s consciousness is emphasized by their absence from the stage. Indeed, language at first seems to be Portia’s weapon against the inadequacy of the world around her, culminating in her cruel denunciation of her wellmeaning but weak-willed husband at the end of Act One. Angry, frustrated, seemingly a law unto herself, Portia may not at first get our sympathy – indeed, one critic placed her “among the least sympathetic characters ever to appear on stage” (Dean) – but her ruthless perceptiveness prompts, if not respect, at least fascination. This infliction of verbal devastation on her surroundings hardly prepares us for the visual image of Portia’s self-destruction at the beginning of Act Two. The act opens with a pulley lifting the dead Portia above the stage:
By the Belmont River. Evening. A search-light swoops around the river.[…] a pulley raises Portia out of the river. She is raised into the air and suspended there, dripping water, moss, algae, frogspawn, waterlilies, from the river.[…] Portia wears only a slip. No one moves, transfixed by the elevated image of the dead

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Portia. Senchil [Portia’s uncle] takes off his jacket, tries to cover her; she’s too high, jacket falls, suspends on her foot, hangs there. Hold a couple of beats. Then lower pulley (223).

Graphic and jarring as the opening image of the act, this visual moment eschews the “ghostly light” and the “love death” atmosphere of The Mai’s demise, as the dripping corpse speaks all too clearly of the literalness of Portia’s death. It is a death that places her in public view – the half-naked, suspended body. At first, the display of Portia’s body seems to suggest the willfulness of her self-exposure: in the body’s refusal to be hidden under the demure covering her uncle offers, we see a visual representation of Portia’s impulse to reject the values of the community that surrounds her – her husband’s pleas that she act as a mother to her children, her father’s warnings against disgracing the family with her affairs – admonitions to which Portia has consistently paid little heed. In this sense, the body, suspended above reach of the other characters, seems oddly to have taken over Portia’s penchant for forceful communication. That this moment startles is abundantly clear. Some critics even questioned the placing of the scene, with one arguing that, “[f]or the sake of rhythm and coherence, Scene 1 in Act 2 should end Act 1” (Klein). But the disjointed rhythm is necessary to our understanding of Portia’s situation. That suspended body is hardly what we expect to see at the beginning of the second act, and the interruption of “rhythm and coherence” forces us to question why it is there at all. Most importantly, Portia, who has at this point become all body, fixes our attention, revealing the discomfort both of the onstage spectators, who try to cover her, and of the audience forced to wait through the silence while the pulley is raised and lowered. This stark, unromanticized image is one that, for a long moment, is significantly experienced in silence, as if, confronted with this messy visual image, speech has become inadequate. Indeed, in Carr’s initial version of the play, published in The Dazzling Dark: New Irish Plays, the potency of the silent response is heightened by the ritualized movement of the other characters, the unified “ensemble choreography” drawing more attention to the body that does not participate in these ordered motions as it “sways there, pulley creaking,[…] water dripping” (258). Eventually, however, as in The Mai, the transformation of the heroine into a lifeless body prompts others to speak for her. While her lovers comment that she was a “strange bird always” and that her husband “could never manage her” (224, 225), what this act seems to show most clearly is the character of the world around Portia, the bitter selfishness that constitutes family life here. Portia’s grandmother, Blaize, insists on playing her favorite records the day of Portia’s funeral, rather lamely defending her action by claiming that Portia “loved the singin’” (226), an assertion unsubstantiated by our observations;4 moreover, she also eagerly takes the opportunity to criticize Raphael (for mar-

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rying Portia) and Portia’s parents (for conceiving demented children). The elsewhere sympathetic ex-prostitute Maggie May viciously reminds Blaize of her husband’s abusiveness and reveals that he once made use of Maggie May’s services. Even Portia’s parents demonstrate little restraint, as her father Sly angrily berates his wife for blaming him for the twins’ deaths, launching into a long narration of his desire to understand his fifteen-years-dead son until his wife has to remind him that “[t]oday is for Portia” (230). The vehemence and pettiness that characterize the world around the now absent heroine go quite a ways toward justifying her denunciation of it and its values. Once the physical reminder of the body disappears, Portia herself seems to get lost, subsumed back into “Portia and Gabriel,” even superseded at the end of the act by Gabriel’s voice. The display of the body in both cases makes the fact of the women’s deaths significantly visible, much as Christina Reid’s Joyriders (1986) counters the offstage demise of Minnie in O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) by bringing the dead heroine, now a “horrific bloody mess” (Reid 73), onstage. Portia, in particular, is inescapably present, even resistant to containment as The Mai is not. If the pleasure of tragedy comes from our emotional purgation, Carr’s method, which pointedly avoids such release, suggests that the audience cannot derive any pleasure from the downfall of these women. Furthermore, if catharsis implies, as Lacan suggests, not just the familiar idea of release but also a sense of purification (186), then the traditional pleasure of tragedy comes not just from the expulsion of emotions but also from the dispersal of feelings that might be deemed dangerous or messy; the audience needs the death/demise of the hero to cleanse itself. Carr’s denial of catharsis is, thus, a denial of this cleanliness, of the audience’s impulse to pass over the explanations and intellectual argument presented in the middle of a play because of the intense emotional release that finality brings. The visual framing of Portia’s corpse seems particularly calculated to emphasize this idea. That suspended body, covered as it is in debris from the river, offers no purification; the pity and the fear may be evoked, but like the moss and the frogspawn, they messily remain. The explanations offered by others for the heroines’ deaths prove wanting in both plays and creating characters who are more than “ciphers” necessitates bringing the women back to life so that some sense can be made of the temporal conclusion we have just witnessed. Rather than handing the heroine’s storyline over to someone else, Carr’s technique places these women back at the center of their own dramas. When she brings her characters back to life, Carr proceeds to examine their relationship to the world around them in order to communicate a fuller sense of how they exist in it and what might make them wish to leave it. As Carr herself comments, “[Y]ou’re watching her living, knowing she’s dead. Everything you see is with that knowledge” (qtd. in Murphy 53): removed through death, we see Portia and The Mai reenter the world

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in a manner that effectively excludes them from full participation in Macintosh’s process of living, thus emphasizing throughout the concluding act, their position as figures simultaneously absent and present. In both cases, this exploration illuminates a greater potential for forceful self-expression: formerly inert bodies become aggressive, vocal, yet that present energy is also juxtaposed in the mind of the audience against the silence – the absence – we have already witnessed. In The Mai the first act’s fairy tale fulfillment of the heroine’s desires creates for us a pacified figure content within the boundaries she has set for herself. Act Two, however, which opens in between the timeframes of the closing scenes of Act One, reveals an anger sparked by Robert’s newest fall from grace: on her fortieth birthday, the title character discovers that he has run off for the weekend with his mistress, leaving his wife nothing but a card and a ten pound note. Presenting us with the devastating nature of The Mai’s disillusionment, the action reveals as well the violence, both verbal and physical, of her response to that loss. Linguistically, The Mai shifts tonal registers, particularly in her interactions with Robert. A character whose bluest language in the first act is “Ara for God’s sake” (112) and who uses this phrase only to express exasperation at the pessimism of the women in her family greets her husband, upon his return from his weekend rendezvous, with a furious “[f]uckin’ bastard!” (153). While expressing suspicion of the impulse to overuse invective – a characteristic that separates Carr from some of her more “macho” contemporaries, like Martin McDonagh and Mark O’Rowe – Carr nonetheless acknowledges that a well-placed “curse can be quite effective” (Battersby). The word “fuck,” however, does not materialize only in a single “well-placed” position. Rather, after the dissonance created by The Mai’s first use of it, the word resonates throughout the act as if this exclamation sets up a verbal echo within The Mai’s world. Not only does her use of the term suggest a desire to remind Robert of the precise nature of his failing, but the repetition also indicates a compulsion within The Mai’s consciousness. A character who has been defined throughout the play by linguistic and physical containment – from the nearly continuous use of the definite article with her name to her own voluntary seclusion within the Owl Lake house – demonstrates through her insistent return to this crude image of sexuality a new layer of imprisonment, her inability to escape the intimate nature of her husband’s betrayal of her. This contraction of boundaries intensifies the heroine’s entrapment, and her newly discovered verbal and physical aggression communicates an inability to discard this means of delimiting her identity, as is suggested by the combined assault that greets Robert’s return to the stage at the beginning of the act. The Mai positions herself, here, before the window where she has previously awaited his return and, when she sees him, begins banging on the glass, then removes “her knickers and throws them at him through the window” (153). Having built the house for Robert and realizing in this moment the failure of

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the house as a talisman that will bring him home once and for all, The Mai, maintaining her stance within the space, assaults and thus calls attention to the very boundary she herself has created. Hurling her panties becomes a way of projecting the intimacy of her betrayal beyond the boundary behind which she has stationed herself from the opening moments of the play and where she will, until the last moments of the action, remain emotionally trapped. When Robert responds by slowly “shak[ing the panties] out, fold[ing] them, and plac[ing] them on the chair beside her” (153), it is an action that suggests a calm dismissal of this effort, the smoothed-over, neatly folded undergarments, significantly detached at this point from contact with their original wearer, become a disembodied emblem of the privacies transgressed in the relationship, an intimate item laid out in the open where it ought not to be. That the climactic argument between husband and wife takes place after a disastrous “Cinderella” ball is telling in more ways than one. In her fantasy of Robert’s return, The Mai has constructed a fairy tale, one whose childish qualities are emphasized in Millie’s memory of the summer before Robert resurfaces in his family’s life. Divesting herself of the trappings of adult reality – her education, her artistic talent, her children, whom she boards with a friend for the summer – The Mai takes a job sweeping up hair in a beauty salon, as if she cannot become Cinderella without first pushing a broom across someone else’s floor. There she befriends a five-year-old Arab princess, whose youthful betrothal to “some sheik or other” (152) validates The Mai’s belief in the destiny of partnering. Together, The Mai and the princess create their own “childish, impossible world,” “waltz[ing] around enthralled with one another” (153). Yet, when it comes time to waltz into the sunset with Robert, the impossibility of it all asserts itself, as The Mai’s prince spends most of the evening with his arm around his mistress. Taken in this light, The Mai’s verbal responses – “Go on to bed and dream of that ignorant fucking bitch![…] You know fuck all about anything!” (175–76) – suggest a desperate effort to adopt a childish version of adult language defined by the force of “adult” words. When The Mai’s method of argument fails to take effect, she attempts to bridge the physical distance of the dance floor with a violent connection in the living room, where she pursues Robert and “wallops him across the face” (177). Having lost control of words, a particularly potent failure for a woman described as “collect[ing] [degrees] like weapons” (177), The Mai attempts to stop words altogether by imposing silence on Robert. In a play in which much of what we learn about The Mai is crucially narrated, these outbursts represent an effort to give control of emotional communication back to the title character: third-party monologue, in these moments of anger, will not suffice as a mode of conveying the action, for its primarily narrative quality dilutes the potential for moment-to-moment conflict. Carr has herself argued that monologue is too easy, too “intrinsically un-dramatic” (qtd. in Sihra 60) to use consistently as a theatrical device, an observation that

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explains both the shift in later work away from the memory play form, which makes use of narrative monologues throughout, and the desire to close this play on a more interactive note. Millie does speak a monologue near the conclusion of the play, one in which she reveals her own nightmares of Owl Lake, but whereas the first act concludes with a static physical image – Robert with The Mai’s dead body – contextualized by a static monologue, Act Two concludes with dialogue and movement. The conversation between mother and daughter not only reveals important background details, including The Mai’s failed effort to relieve her situation with an illicit fuck of her own, but also demonstrates that the intensity of Millie’s response to the suicide is generated in part by the fact that she is the last person to speak with her mother before the event: conversing as her child self while simultaneously inhabiting the actor’s adult body, the moment becomes an interactive effort to understand her mother’s choice, one in which Millie reinhabits the event, rather than simply recollecting it, precisely for this purpose. The success of Millie’s effort at understanding is compromised by the noncommittal nature of The Mai’s final response – when Millie asks if she will come upstairs soon, The Mai casually says, “Yeah,” and then wanders from the room (186). Crucially, the final dialogue reveals quite clearly The Mai’s resignation: even emulating Robert’s sexual exploits and admitting that she has enjoyed the experience do not purge her need for him. While the stage direction asks that the action that follows be evoked through an auditory image of the disturbed lake surface – “Sounds of geese and swans taking flight, sounds of water” (186) – the 1995 Dublin production indicated The Mai’s transition more clearly by having her move from one side of the window (where she has spent years watching for Robert) out the door to the other side, moving in the direction of the water (Morse 119). Neither option shows the moment of death – Carr’s “two seconds” – which seems less important than the movement towards that goal, yet in this more specific blocking, we see the literal completion of the character’s movement: The Mai first enters walking past the window on her way into the house and our last view of her balances that entrance, suggesting the literal and emotional completion of the “arc of [her] life” (qtd. in Sihra 56), a motion that Carr has described as constituting the beauty of tragedy. Unlike The Mai, Portia’s penchant for violent self-expression is already in evidence throughout the action, partly because Portia’s relationship to her surroundings differs greatly from that of her more naïve counterpart. While the beginning of her play fulfills The Mai’s fantasy, the beginning of Portia’s serves for her as a macabre reminder of mortality: her birthday will always recall her twin’s death the day after they turned fifteen. Moreover, her listless interaction with her husband and the already maimed birthday ritual itself – Raphael drops a hefty sum on a “vulgar diamond bracelet” (Carr, Portia 195) that does not at all match Portia’s taste and at the end of the scene makes an

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obligation of the gift by telling her to put it away so that his investment doesn’t get misplaced – give cause for the restlessness Portia exhibits throughout the drama. Portia spends the action of the play cycling through a series of spaces; the pattern of home to river to bar to river to home is repeated in Acts One and Three, offering us a character more mobile than The Mai – Portia negotiates interior and exterior space, public and private – but one whose physically broader boundaries nonetheless still function as limits on her existence and experience. Like The Mai, this is a chosen containment, for Portia at one point in the play argues that she can’t imagine going away for a vacation: she first claims that she doesn’t think she’d “survive a night away from the Belmont Valley” but then qualifies the statement, saying, “I’m sure I’d live through what other folks calls holidays, but me mind’d be turnin’ on the Belmont River” (207; emphasis added), a phrasing that suggests not just a backward glance but an interior acknowledgement of the compulsive revisiting of spaces we witness in the action of the drama. Yet Portia is also aware of the entrapment involved in remaining as she is, a fact that contributes to her outbursts against her parents, her lover, and ultimately, searingly, against Raphael, when she threatens him, at the end of the Act One, with the very objects he has attempted to use to woo her: “[L]ight no more candles for me for fear I blind ya with them” (222). Containment leads to violence – or at least, at this point, the threat of violence – not against the boundaries themselves but against those who share them with Portia. Thus, while her frustration seemingly builds in the first act to a point of uncontrollable outburst, it is one in which she does not so much speak the truth as seek to wound: when she tells Raphael that she has been out “screwin’ the barman from the High Chaparral” (222), the audience is aware that while this may have been her initial intention, she has in fact dismissed Fintan unsatisfied. Portia’s post-“resurrection” actions, however, reveal, in wildly divergent ways, her effort to offer a true account of herself. The most visually arresting of these accountings comes in a physical assault on her mother, one whose instinctive animalism is underscored by the stage direction: perched on a table, Portia executes a “wildcat leap” (248) onto her astonished parent. The body we have previously viewed suspended above the stage becomes a projectile hurled against her mother’s claim to understand Gabriel, and the violence does not end there, as Portia pins her mother to the floor and “flail[s]” at her throughout the following argument about which of them had a stronger connection to a long dead child (248). Physical violence produces a spoken confession, but it is not the pain of the object of the attack that generates truth; instead, it is Portia who admits that she was with Gabriel the night he died, as the effort of violence becomes a means of expelling that which she has hidden all these years. This confession is simultaneously truth and weapon: two scenes earlier, Portia has told Maggie May, in much calmer tones, of her presence at the river’s edge that night, a fact that she has kept from her parents

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because “[t]hey don’t like to talk about Gabriel” (240). Telling now serves both as her own effort at purgation and a determination to wound the interior as she has already injured the exterior. Portia’s confession is further complicated by the fact that the versions she tells Maggie May and her mother are different. While the discrepancy suggests that at least one version is literally untrue (or perhaps Portia is revising in each case with an awareness of what will most satisfy or shock the intended audience), it can actually be seen to communicate a truer sense of Portia’s understanding of her identity in relation to her brother. Immediately after the first revelation, Portia tells Maggie May that she and Gabriel had difficulty differentiating themselves from one another: “He used call me Gabriel and I used call him Portia. Times we got so confused we couldn’t tell who was who and we’d have to wait for someone else to identify us and put us back into ourselves” (241). A difficulty that seems to exist on the level of the name, however, extends (we find through Portia’s brawl with her mother) to the body itself: when her mother reminds Portia that Gabriel “used draw blood from ya when ya tried to defy him,” Portia asserts that “he was doin’ them things to himself for he thought I was him” (249). The intensity of this confusion, the inability to differentiate the body of the self from the body of the other, provides a means of reading and reconciling the differences between Portia’s two versions of her brother’s death. In the first, she argues that they meant to go together and as Gabriel walked into the water ahead of her, “I called him back but he didn’t hear me on account of the swell […] and I’m standin’ on the bank, right here, shoutin’ at him to come back and at the last second he turns thinkin’ I’m behind him” (240). In Portia’s second version, it is Gabriel who speaks: “he whispered to me before he went in. ‘Portia,’ he says, ‘I’m goin’ now but I’ll come back and I’ll keep comin’ back until I have you.’” (250). Given the fluid identity of the twins themselves, this clear differentiation – Portia speaks, Gabriel speaks – breaks down. Who exactly is coming back to get whom? The fact that Portia herself gravitates to the water’s edge, where she meets her lovers, where we later learn that she and Gabriel had sex for years, and where she tells Fintan she feels compelled to be – “I forgot all about ya. I came down here because I always come down here” (218) – offers the possibility that it is not Gabriel hunting/haunting her but the reverse. In Portia’s dual stories, the audience comes face to face with Portia’s sense of a lost body, her own. Ironically, this scene of violence leads directly to a very different effort at self-expression. At the end of the scene, Portia is presented with a ritual object, a purple-and-gold dress that was supposed to be a present for her birthday the previous day. This late offering represents a small mark of human caring, her parents’ effort to make up for their earlier oversight, and as such, it works its own humanizing effect on Portia, who suddenly abandons her animal stance to allow her mother to hold the dress against her. Putting on the dress at the end of the scene, Portia, with it, puts on a determination to enact

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the kind of socialized human ritual that the dress, both as a gift and as an object whose quality makes it inappropriate for everyday use, represents. Indeed, in the very next scene, in which Portia is not only wearing the dress but also her other birthday present, the bracelet that Raphael gave her at the beginning of the play, she sets out to perform the same ritual that failed her husband at the end of Act One. “Props,” as Stanton Garner argues, “establish points of contact between the actor/character and the mise-en-scène” (89), and by wearing her presents, Portia has attempted to situate herself within a ritual mise-en-scène that can bind her to the lived reality of her world: accepting the presents means accepting her connection to their givers. This apparent choice of the living world is reinforced not only by her preparation of a romantic dinner, as she “lights candles, opens wine” (Carr, Portia 253) in anticipation of Raphael’s return, but also by her out-of-character attentions to her children: she has, for once, made them dinner, tucked them into bed, and even read a story with them. Putting aside her previous criticism of the rituals of social interaction, Portia attempts to manipulate them for her own benefit to see if she and Raphael can’t “knock a bit of pleasure out of one another for once” (253), a phrase that echoes her previous assertion that this would not, in fact, be possible: as she tells Stacia in the bar, “I think the pair of us might as well be dead for all the joy we knock out of one another” (207).5 The focus on romance also serves to shift Portia’s attention away from her dead twin (her past) to the possibilities of her present and of her unified (“Portia Coughlan”) rather than her fractured (“Portia and Gabriel”) identity. In one sense, Portia’s ritual fails. As with The Mai’s “enchanted” house, Portia’s effort at generating a romantic atmosphere does not inspire the response it would be expected to generate: the couple “dig in, like peasants, horse it down, heads close to the plate, no conversation, finished” (253). That both proceed to smoke suggests that the dinner represents a kind of sexual encounter, but one whose perfunctory, self-involved nature fails to generate the mutual pleasure it ought. Failing domestic pleasure, however, the ritual does offer the audience and the participants a further moment of truthful connection: an honest conversation between husband and wife. Only after this effort to live the rituals of the world can Portia reveal a memory that she has never told anyone else and that she knows draws her away from full participation in her life. Telling Raphael that marrying him was her effort to “enter the world and stay in it” (255), she reveals instead that what she has learned is that she cannot do so, for she is far more powerfully drawn to the world before the world, one in which the puzzle of identity – the confusion of names, the confusion of bodies – is solved because, within the womb, “all the world is Portia and Gabriel” (254), with little concern over the difference. Wallace points out that Raphael is named “ironically after the archangel who in Hebrew legend personifies the power of healing,” while Gabriel is a name “associated with the manifestation of Divine justice and punishment” (87). The irony, however,

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seems to lie less in Raphael’s inability to heal than in Portia’s inability to allow herself to be healed. In her last speech, in fact, Portia describes Raphael as a potential remedy, telling him that when she first saw him, “the stillness and sureness that came off of you was a balm to me” (255). Yet ultimately the balm of the world is inadequate to heal the wound of separation that occurs, on some level, with entry into the world. The final act demonstrates that what Portia’s death scene accomplishes is far more complex than defiance of social norms. Portia has lived thirty years, Gabriel only fifteen, and the intensity of his influence on her, which seems in the play to grow, suggests that, since his death, her life has been a movement backward (a retracing of those fifteen years), away from adulthood and back to the womb of her – their – birth. Gabriel, after all, dies on the cusp of adulthood, a boy others describe as vaguely feminine in appearance and voice. In fact, Portia’s lovers recall that in school pictures “[you] still can’t tell one of [the twins] from the other” (225), and Gabriel’s death occurs at a time when their maturing bodies are just beginning to make the gender distinction between them obvious. When this mirror self6 – a mirror of Portia’s childhood, girlish self – is taken away, she flounders, incapable of defining a place for herself within – or outside of – her world because she has no idea how to move from childhood into being Portia Coughlan, grown-up woman. Indeed, the statement she makes in the first act that “Raphael is not Gabriel and never will be” (210) is quite true, for Raphael is an adult, while Gabriel exists in her memory as a strange, ghostly child. Her bare, womanly body, displayed so starkly at the beginning of Act Two, becomes a sad indication of the distance between Portia’s physical and emotional growth. The move from the spurned beloved of The Mai to the more complex central figure of Portia Coughlan, who not only traverses wider ground but is also defined by a more complicated series of interactions within that space, suggests a broadening view of femininity in Carr’s early work. If the women share a childish, limiting perspective on life that ultimately leads to their downfall, Portia is decidedly the more dynamic figure, a reading suggested even by the means of her death: both women drown themselves, but The Mai’s lake reminds us of the character’s inability to leave the site of her fantasy, while Portia’s river suggests the possibility of motion, an echo of the escape she and her brother attempted as children when they claimed all they wanted was to go “away […] anywhere that’s not here” (Portia 225). Thus, while Portia’s body is suspended within our view, her spirit can be read as effecting its exit, although the concluding sound effect of “Gabriel’s voice, triumphant” (255) suggests that it is, if mobile, not independent. Still Portia and the world she inhabits, with its haunted landscape and more subtle mythology – instead of Millie’s direct evocation of Coillte and Bláth, we have Gabriel and Raphael, the mock angels who represent very different possibilities for Portia’s salvation – point more clearly to the dark richness of the plays

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that follow, plays whose central tragic figures – both female and male – not only battle their own personal demons but do so in a landscape characterized by a threatening instability. Thus, by reshaping our perspective on the tragic heroine, Carr is also asking us to reconsider the nature of the society that surrounds that figure. As Wallace points out, “the female tragic figure is an eminently twentieth-century mediation of the experience of alienation” (83), and I would argue that, while Carr’s heroines are focal points for our understanding of alienation, they are hardly the only alienated figures within the landscape of the plays. Raymond Williams argues that tragedy is not “what happens to the hero” but “what happens through the hero” (55), and the end of the play has traditionally been understood to provide us with a return to normalcy, a world disordered by the hero’s actions but reconstituted in relief after the hero’s exit. The Mai and Portia Coughlan, however, refuse to offer that relief, either in the present of the plays or in the imagined future of their characters. Millie tells us of her bitter fights with her father after The Mai’s death and of her own botched attempt at a romantic relationship with a married man, eventually concluding that “none of The Mai and Robert’s children are very strong” (184). Carr’s technique in Portia communicates that disorder much more directly, as we watch her relatives bicker over personal vendettas when they are supposed to be memorializing her. In fact, were Portia not resurrected in Act Three, she herself would threaten to become an absence in her own play, so concentrated is the self-absorption of the community around her. If, in The Mai, Carr suggests a world damaged by the heroine’s selfish immaturity, in Portia Coughlan, the apparently aberrant individual becomes a symbol of a society bent on consuming itself through its desire for self-justification and its obsession with past wrongs. The world Carr’s heroines exit is one bereft of closure, an angry insulated rural Ireland, desperately in need of a purging of demons, a need that the deaths of these characters intensifies rather than satisfies. If, “at a time of unprecedented prosperity and development in Ireland it seems curious that the first woman playwright in decades to achieve widespread affirmation should be such a voice of despair” (Wallace 89), Carr’s success suggests that her work speaks to the social instability that accompanies cultural growth, an instability mirrored in these earlier plays in the playwright’s disruption of ordered, linear progress. What we are being asked to look at is not just the dissolution of a life but the fraying of a world confronting its own darkness. n ot e s
1 For more on Irish Antigones, see, in addition to McDonald and Walton’s collection, Roche; Murray. 2 Nicole Loraux argues that a “virile,” masculine death was one that drew blood (11–12), while Margaret Higonnet points out that men “shoot themselves [while

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women] […] take sleeping pills, drink household poisons or turn on the kitchen stove” (104); Higonnet further points to the association between women and watery deaths, contending that “[t]he heroine drifts into destruction, often literally carried by water that reflects the fluidity of her own identity” (114). Except where otherwise specified, all references to Portia are to this text. Although in the initial version of the play, we see Portia acquiesce in Blaize’s requests to “p’an tha Count” (Carr, Portia, Dazzling Dark 246), the action hardly indicates Portia’s own “love” of “the singin’,” a reading strengthened by the amended text, in which the only singing Portia responds to is Gabriel’s. The echo in this last scene was specifically added in the revised version, presumably to intensify the audience’s sense of parallelism between the scenes (see Portia, Plays 1 253). In describing the relationship between Portia and Gabriel, Melissa Sihra notes Carr’s awareness of the mythological tendency to use “twins of both genders [to represent] one whole being” (Carr; qtd in “Stitching the Words”).

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Anderson, Olive. Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. Battersby, Eileen. “Marina of the Midlands.” Irish Times 18 June 2002: 15. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: Verso, 1998. Carr, Marina. Plays 1. London: Faber, 1999. ———. Portia Coughlan. Plays 1 187–255. ———. Portia Coughlan. The Dazzling Dark: New Irish Plays. London: Faber, 1996. 221–97. ———. The Mai. Plays 1 101–86. Clarity, James. “A Playwright’s Post-Beckett Period.” New York Times 3 Nov. 1994: C23. Dean, Joan Fitzpatrick. “Performance Review: Portia Coughlan and The Steward of Christendom.” Theatre Journal 49.2 (1997): 233–36. Esslin, Martin. The Field of Drama. London: Methuen, 1987. Ferris, Lesley. Acting Women: Images of Women in Theatre. New York: New York UP, 1989. Garner, Stanton B., Jr. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. Griffith, Mark. “Antigone and Her Sister(s): Embodying Women in Greek Tragedy.” Making Silences Speak: Women’s Voices in Greek Literature and Society. Ed. André Lardinois and Laura McClure. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. 117–36. Hartigan, Patti. “Giving Voices to Rural Ireland.” The Boston Globe 27 Feb. 1998: C3. Higonnet, Margaret. “Suicide: Representations of the Feminine in the Nineteenth Century.” Poetics Today 6.1/2 (1985): 103–18.

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Kilroy, Ian. “Greek Tragedy, Midlands-Style.” Irish Times 20 Sept. 2002: 14. Klein, Alvin. “Fatalism of the Greeks, Transplanted to Ireland.” New York Times 24 Jan. 1999: NJ11. Lacan, Jacques. “The Splendor of Antigone.” Tragedy. Ed. John Drakakis and Naomi Conn Liebler. London: Longman, 1998. 184–95. Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Scribner, 1953. Larson, Dixie Lee. “The Motif of the Drowned Woman in Nineteenth Century Literature and Art.” Diss. U New Mexico, 1992. Loraux, Nicole. Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. Macintosh, Fiona. Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama. Cork: Cork UP, 1994. McAuley, Gay. Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000. McDonald, Marianne. “The Irish and Greek Tragedy.” McDonald and Walton 37–80. McDonald, Marianne, and J. Michael Walton, eds. Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy. London: Methuen, 2002. Morse, Donald. “‘Sleepwalkers along a Precipice’: Staging Memory in Marina Carr’s The Mai.” Hungarian Journal of English and Irish Studies 2.2 (1996): 111–21. Murphy, Mike. Interview with Marina Carr. Reading the Future: Irish Writers in Conversation with Mike Murphy. Ed. Ní Anluain, Cliódhna. Dublin: Lilliput, 2000. Murray, Christopher. “Three Irish Antigones.” Perspectives of Irish Drama and Theatre. Ed. Jacqueline Genet and Richard Allen Cave. Savage, MD: Barnes, 1991. 115–29. O’Casey, Sean. The Shadow of a Gunman. Two Plays: Juno and the Paycock, The Shadow of a Gunman. New York: Macmillan, 1925. O’Dwyer, Riana. “The Imagination of Women’s Reality: Christina Reid and Marina Carr.” Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre. Ed. Eamonn Jordan. Dublin: Carysfort, 2000. 236–48. Reid, Christina. Joyriders and Tea in a China Cup: Two Belfast Plays. London: Methuen, 1987. Roche, Anthony. “Ireland’s Antigones: Tragedy North and South.” Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in Contemporary Irish Literature. Ed. Michael Kenneally. Totowa, NJ: Barnes, 1988. 221–50. Sihra, Melissa. “Marina Carr.” Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practitioners. Ed. Lillian Chambers, Ger Fitzgibbon, and Eamonn Jordan. Dublin: Carysfort, 2001. 55–63. ———.“Stitching the Words: Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats.” Irish Theatre Forum 3.1 (1999). 1 Aug. 2005. 17 Sept. 2005 <http://www.ucd.ie/irthfrm/issue52.htm>. Swander, Homer. “No Exit for a Dead Body: What to Do with a Scripted Corpse?” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 5.2 (1991): 139–52. Wallace, Clare. “‘A Crossroads between Worlds’: Marina Carr and the Use of Tragedy.” Litteraria Pragensia 10.20 (2000): 76–89. Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1966.