January 15, 2005: Carr, By the Bog of Cats
Wyndham’s Theatre, Charing Cross Road. Directed by Dominic Cooke. Runs approximately 2 hrs., 10 mins., including interval
Holly Hunter is an intense and extremely focused and concentrated actor; she has not an ounce of superfluous fat on a nearly gaunt frame and seems (said my companion) to be made of steel wire. She is deeply and completely into this role of Hester Swane, a sort of tinker who lives mostly in a caravan on the Bog of Cats, a godforsaken place somewhere in central Ireland. The man she loves (Carthage Kilbride) and with whom she conceived a child, Josie (beautifully and convincingly played by Kate Costello in this performance), is to be married to a younger woman, Caroline Cassidy. Hester — she wonders what kind of a name this was that her mother gave her, but those of us who have read Hawthorne know. She suffers from a deep grievance, rejection, or multiple rejections. She killed her own brother, with the help of Carthage (she insists; he denies it) in vengeance for being rejected by her mother and father (not married to one another). And when the wedding takes place Hester, dressed in a white dress, breaks into the party to demand that the newly married Carthage come away with her — he declines — and, when she discovers that Josie has been invited along with Carthage and Caroline on their honeymoon to Spain, in a burst of desperation she kills Josie as well.
If this sounds like a parallel to the Medea story, it is indeed. Carr’s conscious effort and intention here (a program note explains) is to adapt this play about a character of ancient myth to a modern Irish setting. She does so with extraordinary clarity and conviction; the play overflows with vitality and intensity. Most of the scenes take place in front of Hester’s caravan, a dark, menacing presence that is drawn onto the stage; we see it descend and collapse accordion fashion into itself when drawn back off again. It is a brilliant stage device; it sits lonely and starkly on this otherwise featureless bog and becomes a brooding symbol for Hester’s own existential despair.
In fact, one senses early on that this actress is just the right one to play Carr’s central character. She is able to establish and convey throughout the deep misery over being born, over the plight of luckless beings that Carr so eloquently captures in her language and situations: something that goes much deeper than the accidentals, sharp and poignant as they are, of the interaction of characters and the way they are intertwined in the relentless action of the play. We see the vengeful, profoundly self-destructive murder of an innocent child coming and are powerless to do anything except watch the evolution of the drama to its end.
Carr emphasizes the outsize singularity of her morbid protagonist and her separation from the bulk of more ordinary human beings by making her privy to ghosts and apparitions. The first apparition is of a character called The Ghost F