Marina Carr’s Hecuba: agency, anger and correcting Euripides

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on Marina Carr’s 2015 adaptation of Hecuba for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Hecuba sees Carr return to a fascination with Greek tragedy, difficult female characters and reimagining foundational myths. Of all Euripides’ plays Hecuba has rarely been popular, yet the themes Carr prises open – of violence, desire, gendered experience and the politics of perspective – are acutely topical. Indeed, Hecuba seemed to anticipate the frustrations that erupted on 28 October 2015 in response to the Abbey Theatre’s “Waking the Nation” programme. Drawing on twentieth and twenty-first century debates around the politics of tragic form, Roland Barthes theorising of myth, and the tradition of Greek adaptation in modern Irish drama, this paper examines how Hecuba reorients its sources. It goes on to assess the outcomes of these reorientations in order to problematise the critical predisposition to find an inevitably progressive poetics/politics in her engagement with tragic myths.

KEYWORDS:

• Marina Carr
• Hecuba
• Euripides
• tragedy
• adaptation
• rage
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Maleney, “Marina Carr”.

2. See Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Chapter 7 “Feminist Attachments.”

3. O’Gorman, “Writing from the Margins,” 488.

4. Sihra, “Nature Noble nor Ignoble,” 144.

5. Sihra, “Shadow and Substance,” 546.

6. Maleney, “Marina Carr.”

7. Dedebas, “Rewriting of Tragedy and Women’s Agency,” 248–9. Sihra, similarly, has interpreted Carr’s engagement with classical tragedy as indicative of “a need in contemporary theatre for imaginative spaces of possibility, transformation and a fundamental ‘search for myth’ at a time which the playwright considers is plagued by a ‘lack of belief and limited by ‘an existence on the rational plane’.” In Dillon and Wilmer, Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today, 116.

8. Dedebas, 249.

9. González Chacón, “Myths in crisis?”, 66.

10. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 54.

11. Dollimore, 56.

12. Krook, Elements of Tragedy, 17. Cited in Dollimore, 56.

13. This quotation is cited often but remains difficult to source. It originates in Barthes, “Il n’y a pas d’école Robbe-Grillet,” 6–8; a text reprinted in Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964) 101–105. More often cited as the epigraph to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s essay “Nature, Humanism and Tragedy,” Nouvelle revue française 70 (1958) 580–603. 580.

14. See Eagleton, Sweet Violence, 277–297. 287 in particular.

15. Barthes, Mythologies, 107.

16. Barthes, 128, 141.

17. See for instance, Foley, Female in Greek Tragedy.

18. Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 8.

19. Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 63.

20. Margherita Laera ed., Theatre and Adaptation, 7.

21. McDonald, “Classics as Celtic Firebrand”, 16.

22. McDonald, 16, 17.

23. Rees, Adaptation and Nation, casts a fresh eye over aspects of this dense terrain, and Carr’s theatre, specifically.

24. See Wallace, “Authentic Reproductions”, 43–64.

25. Hutton, “Interview with Marina Carr about Hecuba,” 5.

26. Ellwood, The Politics of Myth, 174.

27. See note 25 above.

28. The Irish premiere of Hecuba, directed by Lynne Parker and produced by Rough Magic Theatre Company with a new cast, opened at the Dublin Theatre Festival in September 2019.

29. Billington, “Hecuba review – a radically different take on a familiar story”; Cavendish, “Hecuba, RSC Stratford, review”; Shuttleworth, “Hecuba, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, review”. More positively: Williams, “The RSC’s new ‘Hecuba’”; Taylor, “Hecuba, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, review”; and Brian, “Hecuba review at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon”.

30. See Genette, Palimpsests.

31. Sanders, 26.

32. See note 25 above.

33. Leavy, “Marina Carr interview”.

34. Meridor, “Hecuba’s Revenge, Some Observations on Euripides’ Hecuba” offers a detailed overview of the different stories of Hecuba and what Euripides adds.

35. See Dugdale, “Hecuba,” 104–105, also Meridor, “Hecuba’s Revenge, Some Observations on Euripides’ Hecuba”.

36. Dugdale, “Hecuba,” 105.

37. See Cropp, “Lost Tragedies,” who describes Medea and Hecuba as “vengeful barbarians”, 284.

38. See Gregory, Euripides’ Hecuba, xxiii.

39. Foley, Female in Greek Tragedy, 283.

40. Ibid., 298.

41. Eric Dugdale’s translation (l. 1265), translated by Edward P. Coleridge as “a dog with bloodshot gaze” in The Plays of Euripides Vol. II (London: G. Bell, 1913).

42. William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act II Scene 2 line 530.

43. I am deliberately excluding adaptations of The Trojan Women which is a much less provocative play where Hecuba is simply a grief-stricken victim of war and atrocity.

44. González Chacón, “Re-examining and Redeeming the Tragic Queen” compares the two playwrights’ treatments of their source text at some length.

45. See note 20 above.

46. Italics mine.

47. Carr, Hecuba, 12. Further references to this text will be given parenthetically.

48. The trailer for the RSC production was directed by Christopher McGill and is available at: https://vimeo.com/137678468.

49. Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh An APGRD Public Lecture from October 2015. Podcast.

50. Marina Carr in conversation with Fiona Macintosh.

51. See note 25 above.

52. See note 49 above.

53. Ibid.

54. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 144.

55. See note 49 above.

56. Cavendish, “Hecuba, RSC, Stratford, review,” Telegraph 25 September 2015 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/hecuba-rsc-stratford-review/.

57. Eagleton, Sweet Violence, 287.

58. See note 49 above.

59. See note 6 above.

60. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 175.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund-Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734).