The God and His Daughter
Abbey Theatre
★★★☆☆
Marina Carr’s greatest gift as a playwright has been her ability to transform dense classical literature into something that sounds like a conversation overheard at a mart. By the Bog of Cats reimagined Medea in the Irish midlands; The Mai channelled Aeschylean intergenerational trauma through small-town despair.
At its best, The God and His Daughter, the second part of Carr’s reworking of Sophocles’ Theban plays, sounds like, well, a Marina Carr play.
“Isn’t it great for you?” the Shee quips (offstage) to Jocasta, the disgraced wife and mother of Oedipus. “Are they looking after you?” Jane Brennan’s electrifying Queen of the Furies asks, with the nosy concern of a rural B&B owner. Actual location: hell.
The trouble is, The God and His Daughter has plenty of lamentation and not nearly enough Carr.
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While Antigone continues to inspire urgent modern retellings, from Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes to Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire, and from Antigone in Ferguson (linked to police violence in the United States) to The Island (a protest against apartheid in South Africa), Carr’s iteration gives Antigone little more than a walk-on role. Despite the best efforts of Éilish McLaughlin, this Antigone is a bit player in her own tragedy.
Instead The God and His Daughter stays with the fallen king Oedipus (Frank Blake), now blinded and exiled, as he seeks refuge in Athens, where Theseus (Abdelaziz Sanusi) offers him shelter. The political tensions in Thebes, his sons Eteocles and Polynices now at war, are narrated rather than dramatised.
The opening section, in which Oedipus awaits deification, is weighted with exposition. The lone, leafless tree on Cordelia Chisholm’s set, evoking Waiting for Godot, stands as a symbol of dramatic inertia. Carr, usually so sharp at catching myth in wild, furious motion, seems stalled.
Antigone’s later attempt to bury her mangled brother in defiance of Creon (a sleek Seán Mahon) is rushed and emotionally underdeveloped. The confrontation between niece and uncle, in which he calls her a “scheming, vindictive, entitled girl b**ch”, lacks the urgency or scale its tragic stakes require. It all feels too mannered, too polished, for true dramatic combustion.
The production seems most alive when it returns to the underworld. In separate codas both Oedipus and Jocasta are resurrected for posthumous reflection. Eileen Walsh – the best thing in both plays – delivers a magnificent Jocasta, interviewed in a shadowy version of hell by Zara Devlin. Her ecstatic monologue is defined by table-humping and orgiastic noise.
Oedipus, too, is granted a final sequence, a kind of cosmic reckoning that stretches beyond death into mythic time.
These codas are vivid and strange – classic Carr territory – but they feel disconnected from the play’s earlier acts. The God and His Daughter offers fascinating footnotes to The Boy, Carr’s first, more dynamic entry in the sequence. As a stand-alone, however, it struggles to find its centre.
Runs at the Abbey, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until November 1st
