iGirl: Marina Carr’s freewheeling origin of the species

Weaving together myth and history, the Abbey’s play teases did the right human species survive? Photo: Ros Kavanagh

Abbey Theatre - Abbey Stage, Dublin

★ ★

Behold this mysterious woman whose unusual presence resembles a creature from a spiritual otherworld. Whether crouched on all-fours as a hostile outsider or standing bolt-upright as a humorous messenger, she is primitive one minute and regal the next. Now, after embodying a number of epoch-making characters from the past, she offers a new version of human history.

Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Olwen Fouéré.

The above description could also sum up Girl, the sole inhabitant of the Abbey Theatre’s new play iGirl, an unworldly being who leapfrogs centuries and assumes the form of individuals as stately as Oedipus and Joanne D’Arc. Fouéré, having played similarly metaphysical roles such as Cathleen Ní Houlihan and Anna Livia Plurabelle, is about the only actor who can play Girl.

“I’m having prehistoric thoughts about myself,” says Girl, sitting at a desk while reflecting on a painful existence. A stage, made impressively cavernous by Sinéad Wallace’s lighting, becomes transformed by set designer Joanna Parker’s sweeping blockbuster-size displays, sending Girl into a white empty wasteland disrupted only by a large chunk of black primeval rock.

When Girl jaunts into an entertainer as revealing as a Shakespearean fool (in more ways than one – Catherine Fay’s transgressive costuming leaves Fouéré’s breasts uncovered), she laments the extinction of the Neanderthal and wonders if the right human species survived. From there, Marina Carr’s script teases that question, summoning punished figures from myth and history, from a rebellious Antigone to a sacrificed Joanne D’Arc, like a continuum of relentless tragedy.

The most intriguing aspect of Caitríona McLaughlin’s first production as artistic director of the Abbey Theatre – aside from its blend of visceral themes and visually-gripping displays, leaving us to wonder if this is the theatre’s new “house style”? – is its recollection of the Neanderthal species, whether in the arch glow of a cigarette lighter or in Fouéré’s primal physicality, as repulsed and slaughtered by our ancestors. Seen at the end of his life, an abandoned Oedipus agonises over how everything pure in the world becomes warped, as if it were our biological imperative: “Sometimes I think is it not the taint we’re after”? Against the calamity of Oedipus’s family, or the sad abduction of Peresphone, might the Neanderthals have turned out more humane than humanity?

Similar to Lauren Shannon Jones and Eoghan Carrick’s play Rescue Annie, this might read as a sad fate made possible by inherited myths and stories. iGirl sometimes resembles a heavy work of classicism though, veering in and out of different mythological and historical episodes that those unfamiliar with references such as the Grove of the Furies from Oedipus at Colonus will re-emerge with unexplained details that feel like they have asterisks annotated after them.

Compared to those very recognisable stories, the weaving-in of a number of anonymous, non-historical figures - such as a woman recalling her father’s deathbed, or a playwright acknowledging how her life will go undocumented - makes the play both exact and abstract, dividing an audience’s attention between scholarly sources and deliberately allusive flash points. That leaves blurred parameters for this freewheeling origin of the species, and how to crack it open.

Runs until 30th October.