The cast of The Boy are rehearsing a deceptively simple task: a collective turn. Each actor must register a sudden entrance. But when they all turn at once it feels too polished, too choreographed. Almost comedic.
Caitríona McLaughlin, the production’s director, stops them. “Not in unison. Not on the same beat. Everyone has a slightly different response time. As if it happened in life.”
They try again, each head turning a fraction after the other. By the sixth attempt the rhythm clicks. It takes extraordinary effort to make a moment seem effortless, but even the smallest gesture must serve the truth of the play.
There’s a lot at stake in The Boy, Marina Carr’s sweeping two-part reimagining of Sophocles’ Theban plays, which is premiering at the Abbey Theatre this autumn as part of Dublin Theatre Festival. It is the kind of undertaking that makes demands not just of the actors but of the whole ecology of a theatre: seven years in development, delayed by the pandemic, and carrying the weight of some of the most canonical myths of western drama.
RM Block
For Carr, one of Ireland’s most prominent playwrights, and for McLaughlin, who is also the Abbey’s artistic director, the scale of the project is both daunting and exhilarating.
They’ve been here before: Carr and McLaughlin are long-time collaborators, and their mutual admiration is evident. We meet to talk in a small room outside the rehearsal space filled with props: a vase, a strip of linen, bits of bone and a box intriguingly labelled “Sphinx”.
The Boy takes familiar material from Greek myth, the Oedipus and Antigone stories that many audiences think they know: Oedipus, unaware of his true parents, kills his father and marries his mother, Jocasta; Antigone, their daughter, is sentenced to death for disobeying a tyrant’s orders. But Carr weaves conflicting sources together with surprising twists and flashes of dark humour, resulting in a play that is both recognisable and startlingly original.
What were the challenges in approaching these myths? “Part of the problem was trying to escape Sophocles,” Carr says. The literary critic Harold Bloom “called it the anxiety of influence. It’s very hard to put your own stamp on the Theban trilogy. It took me a long time to engage with the plays on my own terms, because they are difficult. They’re well made and beautiful, but also clunky; the material is hard to become familiar with.
“So how do you get inside the blueprint of an ancient myth and transpose it? How do you communicate that with actors in the room? It took me years. It took Caitríona years too.”
There’s a long tradition of reinterpreting these plays – with Antigone, for example, Jean Anouilh and Bertolt Brecht each reshaped the tragedy in the context of fascism, using it as a vehicle to confront the moral crises of their time.
Did this add to Carr’s feeling of responsibility? No, because her intention was never political in such a straightforward way. “Politics comes out of the human heart,” she says. “We feel things first, and then we try to put language on them. It’s always about the characters and what they’re going through in human terms. To turn them into living, breathing people, that was the main thing. Not mouthpieces for a point of view or a political idea.”
McLaughlin echoes the sentiment. “The problem now is that a lot of young writers come along and they write an issue-based play. And it hammers you over the head with that issue until you don’t care any more.
“Marina is really brave in writing the complexity of what people feel and think, and how people respond, sometimes in not very pretty ways, sometimes in violent or shocking ways. She’s unapologetic about that.
“And because she’s so committed to writing about what human beings are, in the full spectrum from love to hate, everybody can see their story in it. That’s what the history of playwriting is. Its prime function is to let us see ourselves. The skill of a great playwright is to let everybody see themselves, because the way the play is written doesn’t limit it to one issue.”
“There’s a huge conversation here between the temporal and the eternal,” Carr says, “where we position ourselves now, as a country and as individuals. It seems to me there’s an awful lot of confusion. One of the things I love about Sophocles is that when he wrote the Theban trilogy, Athens was in turmoil.
“They were rejecting the gods, declaring that man is the measure of all things, and then the gods descended to teach them a lesson. You wonder if the gods are descending now, and what kind of lesson they might be about to teach us. Maybe it will be the same one.”
The Boy stages violence and taboo without apology: there’s disease and death, incest and intergenerational trauma, power enforced by the most brutal means. It depicts a dark, turbulent world in which the lives of children are treated casually. To watch such acts unfold onstage is, inevitably, to think of our own world. “It doesn’t take a huge leap,” Carr says. But the aim is not to prescribe meaning, only to evoke it.
“We take on a lot more on the subconscious level,” McLaughlin adds. “Our brain fills in the gaps and tries to create logic. I’m hoping everyone will be making their own logic. I hope that the audience will just accept the visual imagery layered on top and make their own sense of it without me saying, ‘That’s what that represents.’”
The result is a theatre of the subconscious, allegorical rather than literal, an atmosphere that isn’t tied to one particular history but rather tries to evoke the cycles of history. “Time is never linear,” Carr says. “Not in our minds, in our imaginations.”
As a result the play leans heavily into dream logic. “Are we our soul or our body? Is the soul older than the body?” McLaughlin asks in a playful tone. “If the moon can be a person, why can’t Oedipus be a baby and a man at the same time?”
The avoidance of anything too obvious or dogmatic reveals the deeper ambition of the project: to dwell in ambiguity, however uncomfortable. “I definitely think that both of us are interested in sitting in the contradiction, or that doubt space,” McLaughlin says.
You wonder what lessons we all need to learn in our own lives, because we do need to learn, and we need to grow. It’s about suffering our way into truth. None of us want to face the things we’d rather not know, but we’re forced to learn them, to endure them
— Marina Carr
“Context is everything, and every day we contradict ourselves, depending on the context, without realising. So you can absolutely know something in one way but not know it in another way. I think there are lots of interesting things in the way the story is revealed. And in the way that all our stories and all our memories are revealed.”
For a modern audience the Oedipus myth inevitably carries the shadow of Sigmund Freud. The Boy plays with that inheritance, drawing on the language and techniques of psychoanalysis. In Sophocles’ telling, shame is the silent weight that drives Jocasta to hang herself, that leaves Oedipus mutilated and exiled. For Carr, the silence of Jocasta was always both troubling and fascinating. It was also a starting point for her own adaptation. She wanted to imagine Jocasta’s version of events. How much did she know? What if she hadn’t been driven by shame to end her life?
“Shame is such a pervasive thing in Ireland. We are taught to be ashamed of everything,” McLaughlin says. “But what if you remove shame? What are you left with?”
The question is not rhetorical: it is the engine of the play – “to put mother and son, who are also husband and wife, onstage and just see what happens”.
In Carr’s retelling, Jocasta and Oedipus are not reduced to grotesque symbols of incestuous horror but treated as two people in love. During her research McLaughlin came across the disturbing fact that if family members are separated at birth, there is often a physical attraction when they are reunited.
“The draw to each other outweighs everything else. I wanted to imagine what happens if you strip that taboo away. What if nothing is off limits, because you’re starting over again? What if, instead of disgust, you just see two people with a successful relationship who then discover they’re mother and son?”
Plays like this are essential for survival. They force us to think. It’s terrifying but necessary
— Caitríona McLaughlin
She pauses, admitting that it’s hard not to feel instinctively disgusted. “It’s a really dangerous idea. But it must have happened when we were a small number in the cave. What if the horrible thing is not the act but the knowledge, the rules, the shame we were taught to feel? Who taught us what to be ashamed of?”
Carr paraphrases a sentiment from Tennessee Williams that has always resonated with her: “Nothing disgusts me except deliberate cruelty.” By removing shame she also removes the easy pathway of condemnation, forcing the audience to reckon with their own instinctive recoil. Perhaps the effect will be unsettling, even scandalous. But that unease is the point.
“The gesture of the play is to be provocative and entertaining,” McLaughlin says, “but also to remind us that, in the contemporary world, we still have to think about who we are; how we behave toward each other, what we care about and what we accept through habit.
“We’re at a moment where we’re constantly being told what to do, what to think. If we don’t catch ourselves, if we don’t each take responsibility for our own thoughts and actions, we’ll turn into zombies. That’s why it’s so urgent for me to put on this play now: to remind us that we are thinking beings, and we don’t have to follow the crowd.”
For McLaughlin, the play is a reaction to patriarchy and its inherited silences, “The assumptions that have controlled us, our grandparents, parents, friends. We have to start over, but we can’t even have a conversation, because you’re judged just for listening. Plays like this are essential for survival. They force us to think. It’s terrifying but necessary.”
“You wonder what lessons we all need to learn in our own lives,” Carr says, “because we do need to learn, and we need to grow. It’s about suffering our way into truth. None of us want to face the things we’d rather not know, but we’re forced to learn them, to endure them.
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“Without being too bleak, that’s a fundamental question for all of us: who we are in the world, what our responsibilities are, but also what our joys and passions might be.
“It’s about embracing the beauty and miracle of living while also accepting its harder aspects: loss, grief, sorrow, our own mortality and the mortality of those we love, the mistakes we make and the cost they bring. Because we all make mistakes.”
She pauses for a moment, then adds, “It’s about all of that – and, finally, it’s a family saga. Three generations.” She laughs at the anticlimax, the obvious oversimplification.
“About love!” McLaughlin adds. “A play about love!”
“Yes. Love and transgression,” Carr says.
The Boy previews at the Abbey Theatre from Monday, September 15th, until Tuesday, September 30th; it then runs from Wednesday, October 1st, until Saturday, November 1st, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival
