Marina Carr – författare

This third richly varied collection of plays by Marina Carr was published to coincide with the Royal Shakespeare Company's premiere of Hecuba at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in September 2015.Sixteen Possible Glimpses imagines sixteen fleeting moments in Anton Chekhov's short life and work. Phaedra Backwards retells the Phaedra myth to discover what shaped her. The Map of Argentina offers a meditation on love and what happens when it is denied, or pursued and hunted down. Hecuba was written in reaction to the bad press this Trojan queen receives, and reimagines how she may have suffered and reacted. Indigo is a dark and passionate romance amongst fairies, demons, ghouls and every sort of fantastic creature out of folklore and myth.

The first collection of plays by Marina Carr introduces the work of a major new voice in playwriting. Low in the Dark'One of the most exciting, new and absolutely original aspects of Carr's writing is the manner in which the sexism of the language and religious imagery is exposed... Marina Carr is a playwright to be watched.' Sunday TribuneThe Mai'The writing is at once gentle and raucous... capable of articulating deep-seated woes and resentments in a manner you rarely find outside Eugene O'Neill.' ObserverPortia Coughlan'A play of precocious maturity and accomplishment.' Irish Times'Portia Coughlan packs a hell of a punch. It hurts to look at it. But it has to be seen.' Irish IndependentBy the Bog of Cats...'A poetic realism steeped in the past... Carr has an extraordinary ability to move between the mythic and the real.' Guardian'A great play... a great work of poetry... the word should soon carry across both sides of the Atlantic.' Independent

A modern classic by one of Ireland's greatest contemporary playwrights, reissued in a beautiful typographic jacket.I was born on the Bog of Cats and on the Bog of Cats I'll end me 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.As Hester Swane embarks on a terrible journey of vengeance through the mysterious, mythic landscape of the bogs of rural Ireland, the dark secrets of her tangled history are slowly revealed.By the Bog of Cats . . . premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 1998.'Carr has an extraordinary ability to move between the mythic and the real.' GUARDIAN'A great play . . . a great work of poetry.' INDEPENDENT'Swane's irrepressible personality is the play's driving force, a firestorm of contradictory emotions breaking across the stage in waves of love and fear. Her fierce attachment to her home, to her family and to her way of life comes up hard against the desires and prejudices of her community. As dark as the play is, it is also tender and funny in its attempts to represent a spectrum of human experience much broader than its characters' accents.' IRISH TIMES

A woman - gaunt and ill, haggard after giving birth eight times - faces death. What was life? What was love? What else could have been? Full of mordant, bitter humour, this is a passionate threnody from one of Ireland's leading playwrights.Woman and Scarecrow premieres at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in June 2006.

On Raftery's Hill'This is a play that howls to be seen; its courage is matched only by its dramatic power.' Sunday IndependentAriel'An astonishing piece of theatre. Interweaving themes drawn from Irish, Greek and biblical myth, she spins a tale of power that is honest, emotional, dark and true . . . Die to see it.' Irish ExaminerWoman and Scarecrow'Drama doesn't come much richer or stranger than this death-bed lament. Ravishing in its dense, literary language, it is as visceral as it is intellectual. It lingers not only in the ear and brain, but in the imagination and the gut. An extraordinary brew, bittersweet and totally intoxicating.' The TimesThe Cordelia Dream'A brave piece and clearly charged with deep feeling. . . This is certainly unsettling territory and Carr boldly goes for it.' Financial TimesMarble'An extraordinary play that lures us in with a promise of the recognisable only to drag us screaming into the soaring, magnificent possibilities of love and the destruction that it wreaks.' Irish Independent

I NeanderthalPrince of the PlainsI saw EdenIt wasn't muchI sawThe treeThe gatesRustyBut stillIntactI sawThe triple lockThe jack bootThe size of an oakI retreatedWiselyGod they WereUgly Marina Carr's iGirl premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in October 2021.

A sinister night.Evil and edge in the air.What are they celebrating?Clytemnestra's world is torn apart when Agamemnon sacrifices their daughter for the sake of war. Ten years later, the couple are reunited. What follows is a dangerous battle fuelled by love, grief and power.Marina Carr's adaptation of the infamous Greek myth brings Clytemnestra's story to the fore and asks if it is possible to forgive the unforgivable.He turns to me in hall one evening, wine on him, sentimental. There is nothing I would not do to have your good opinion again, he says.Girl on an Altar opened at the Kiln Theatre, London, in May 2022. The production transferred to the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in July 2023. 'Mesmerisingly compelling . . . Carr's words are a delight to hear, even at their most bleak. Bracingly good.' Evening Standard'Cool and deadly . . . Homeric in its vivid detail and oral splendour.' Guardian

Winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 1997. 'Carr's harrowing play has the scale and anguish of myth, and the immediacy of a contemporary anecdote.' Independent on SundayThere's a wolf tooth growin in me heart and it's turnin me from everywan and everthin I am.Portia Coughlan lives life in monstrous limbo, haunted by a yearning for her spectral twin brother lying at the bottom of the Belmont river, unable to find any love for her wealthy husband and children, seeking solace in soulless affairs, deeply afraid of what she might do.Portia Coughlan premiered on the Abbey Theatre's Peacock Stage, Dublin, in April 1996 and transferred to the Royal Court Theatre, London, in May that year. It was revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, in October 2023.'Taut and haunting, funny and sad . . . Carr plays with time and place to resonant, ultimately devastating effect.' The Stage'One of the most important Irish plays of the twentieth century.' Arts Review'Marina Carr goes to a deep place that has not just to do with society now but that touches an inner tragedy of existence. The female quality of her writing comes through not only in the way she writes about women, it's in the physicality in her writing. She is right in there with the cycles of life, with the blood and the dirt.' Joyce McMillan, New York Times

It was a terrible crossing. The worst yet. There weren't enough boats. I had to stab my way up the gangplank. It was pitch black and the ferryman hadn't an eye in his head.In a house, a young mother watches over her sleeping baby. But in this dark and dangerously funny play, nothing is as it seems.Audrey or Sorrow is a shape-shifting, time-bending deep dive into a world of unimaginable loss. It exemplifies Marina Carr's work: storytelling that pushes the boundaries of love, power and desire.Draw coal. Coal is a beautiful thing. Someday we'll all be coal. A Landmark Productions and Abbey Theatre co-production, it opened at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in February 2024.

Your woman ranting, who said this, who said that, who said the other, all boils down to the usual rigmarole. The Oracle says don't. The clodhopper says I will if I want. The Oracle flattens him, the clodhopper cuts out his eyes or the other clodhoppers cut them out for him, the clodhopper repents, the Oracle relents, everyone dies and they all live happily ever after until the whole malarkey begins again. Marina Carr brings a contemporary lens to the pain and beauty of Sophocles' Theban trilogy, in two new plays published together here. This epic, darkly funny retelling of the story of Oedipus and his family continues Carr's vivid conversation with the foundations of modern drama. The Boy and The God and His Daughter opened at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in September 2025. The Boy was first performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in September 2025.