The Boy
Abbey Theatre
★★★★☆
In an age when the Oedipus myth is having a moment – Robert Icke’s political-thriller version, Ella Hickson’s climate-inflected update, Hofesh Shechter’s expressionistic dance chorus – Marina Carr’s The Boy enters a crowded conversation.
Unsurprisingly, the playwright distinguishes herself with a uniquely Irish sense of fatalism and wit. The language slips easily between lyrical and local: “put manners on them” lands as both a wry joke and a theological rebuke.
The first instalment of Carr’s tremendous reworking of Sophocles’ Theban plays opens behind a shimmering, deceptively translucent curtain, ushering us into a world that looks sacred, even celestial, but where everything is irreverent, save for the full Freudian brunt of the Oedipus cycle and its fallout.
At its core The Boy is a play about belief: in gods, in fate, in stories we tell ourselves. Carr wrestles with one of humanity’s oldest questions: do the gods exist or are we just talking to ourselves in funny voices? Olwen Fouéré’s authoritative oracle, Shee, leaves us in plenty of doubt, even in a play written for a slick, atheistic age.
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Above the action, occasionally distracting projected images flicker, offering a literal god’s-eye view of the mortal drama below, both reinforcing and questioning the presence of higher powers. Cordelia Chisholm’s design, grand and palatial, is certainly worthy of myth; the set is pitched somewhere between an Irish great house and a Kubrickian fever dream.
The most radical gesture may be the way Carr and, as director, Caitríona McLaughlin set up a theological and theatrical paradox: the gods are everywhere. And possibly nowhere.
Dressed in absurd Halloween costumes, these buffoonish gods are comic and camp. It is left to the actors to shine beneath their panto garb.
Jolly Abraham, even in a gold lamé Aladdin cast-off, moves and mesmerises like a magical animal. Amy Conroy’s Moon is all set for the drag bingo, and Catherine Walsh’s brilliantly grotesque Sphynx gets most of the play’s laughs.
As they bicker and prance in Catherine Fay’s camp designs, they undermine their own existence: the sequins frame them as absurd projections of human chaos. The fateful action does not.
Their disdainful asides – “I can be a liberal too” – suggest vanity rather than celestial wisdom. But their presence haunts the play, not least because the human characters continue to manifest their wicked prophecies.
Carr’s Oedipus doesn’t campaign. Rather, The Boy taps into our current cultural obsession with rot at the top, from crumbling monarchies and fallen politicians. We never see the impacted masses: we hear their plight. It’s a classic Marxist reading, infused, unexpectedly, with sympathy for the devils.
Chief among these is Frank Blake’s Oedipus, who enters the play as a well-meaning rube, only to progress morally downwards.
The final act shifts tone. A near two-hander between Blake’s charismatic Oedipus and Eileen Walsh’s commanding, intimate, humping Jocasta is a revelation.
The first play in Carr’s Oedipal sequence – the other is The God and His Daughter, simultaneously inspired by Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone – doesn’t tidy up its contradictions. It offers no creed, only the act of witnessing, asking us, like all the best Greek tragedies, to look unflinchingly at the world we have made.
Runs at the Abbey, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Saturday, November 1st
