Marina Carr
BY THE BOG OF CATS

Translation by Marija Stojanović

Translation: Marija Stojanović

Premiere: 10 May 2009 at 8 PM, at ’Ljuba Tadić’ Stage.
Running time: approx. 1h 25’, with no intervals

Speech

Artistic collaborator in costume design

ABOUT THE PLAY
When I work on a play, it is natural for me to go from the subject to the play, and subjects that within themselves keep Le Tartuffe and In the Bog of Cats have been attracting me for a long time. We live in a time when nothing is more important than money and the feeling of power that comes as a consequence of economic enrichment. Everything can be exchanged with money today, even the most important things like: love, family, friendship. I didn’t want to work on Euripides’ Medea because that is a chamber or a courtly play. Marina Karr put the core of the play into a context of an isolated, poor and marginal social group, where the essence of maltreatment through buy-and-sell relations is most visible. This is a typical contemporary classical work because today, using a story that has been present for thousands of years, it questions our world and values in a very serious way. Love, friendship, family are the fundamental values, threatened and questioned today maybe more than ever before in the history of humankind. The unfortunate combination of moral and economic crisis makes life impossible. Hester, in contrast to Medea, is not a foreigner. She is naturally rooted in her own place and belongs to the swamp more than any other character in the drama. She is prosecuted by her own closest family because of economic interests and she can not stand this type of betrayal, but has no efficacious means to stop it. Her powerlessness and rage because of this injustice which the close ones do to each other, is a fertile ground to transform love into extreme hate. It is impossible to make a clear distinction between very strong emotions and Hester, a woman from the folk, acts instinctively, without making a big difference between love and hate.   

Egon Savin

ABOUT AUTHOR

Marina Carr is one of the most talented of the new generation of Irish playwrights to emerge in the 1990s. Carr has established herself as major voice in both Irish and British theatre with a sequence of very dark plays in which there are recurringthemes of families trapped in self-destructivepatterns of behaviour across the generations,absent family members casting shadows overthe present, the revelation of past horrors,incest, deaths foreshadowed or enacted out ofnarrative sequence.

Born on 17 November 1964 in Tullamore, County Offaly, Carr attended University College Dublin. She graduated from UCD in 1987. Carr has been nurtured by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. She held posts as writer-in-residence at the Abbey Theatre and Trinity College Dublin. Carr’s work as writer-in-residence not only at the Abbey but also at Trinity College Dublin mean she is now part of the Irish theatre establishment. She is also well regarded in America and Britain, and often performed around the world. She served as Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2003.

Carr herself has said thatthe plot of By the Bog of Cats is ‘completelyMedea’.Her drama is a blend of rural Irish domestic tragedy and classical re-writing, a mixture which marks her out as a writer concerned with both the minutiae of individual struggles and the poetry of grand-scale human tragedy.

Her awards include The Irish Times Best New Play Award, the Dublin Theatre Festival Best New Play Award 1994, a Macauley Fellowship, a Hennessey Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and an E.M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She has three children, currently lives in Kerry and is a member of Aosdána.

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ABOUT DIRECTOR

Egon Savin is a professor of Directing at Faculty of Drama Arts. He has directed at almost all significant theatres of former Yugoslavia, and his productions toured Nancy, Paris, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Vienna, New York, Chicago. He received numerous awards.
He has worked successfully with all production models present in our country: from the production of Farewell Judas in mid-seventies, gathering together a group of conspiring young actors and forming one of the possible forms of a theatrical off-scene, to productions at institutions of national significance – National Theatre Belgrade, Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad, Montenegrin National Theatre in Podgorica, Macedonian National Theatre.

He has staged the plays by national and international classics with great success, and found in them concrete clues that reveal essential power of theatre in our times and connect both these works and their authors to a concrete space and time.

At Yugoslav Drama Theatre, he has directed the productions of Passion According to Zivojin by Radoslav Pavlovic, Summerfolk by Maxim Gorky, The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, Forest by A.N. Ostrovsky and It Had To Be So by Branislav Nusic.

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IZ KRITIKA

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