Dublin Theatre Festival 2025: The Boy

Éilish McLaughlin and Eileen Walsh in Marina Carr's The God and His Daughter. Image, Ros Kavanagh

***

‘Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.’ So claims Shakespeare in Sonnet One. A modern rendering might go, ‘you’re your own worst enemy, giving yourself a hard time’. True, there's a family resemblance, but the depth, power and poetry of the original is lost. The same might be said for Marina Carr’s two play event The Boy, which refashions Sophocles’ Theban trilogy into a durational, multi-generational family drama in which reason and religion are seasoned with feminist revisioning. All three plays given a hearty, down to earth, Irish grounding. Think Thebes relocated to Tipperary for Succession styled fisticuffs. Where everyone betrays everyone else and dies feverishly blessing themselves or professing disbelief in the gods. Who, it transpires, are all women. Part One, The Boy, focuses primarily on Oedipus Rex. Part Two, with loaded title The God and His Daughter, focuses on Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. Both productions joined at the hip like Kill Bill One and Two. Featuring fine direction by Caitríona McLaughlin who crafts an utterly gorgeous spectacle of operatic opulence, like a Hollywood religious movie of the 1950s. Centred around two towering performances from Eileen Walsh as a lusting Jocasta and Éilish McLaughlin as a commanding Antigone.

Marina Carr's The Boy. Image, Ros Kavanagh

Intentions are good. To marry Greek mythology with an Irish sensibility so as to explore the relationship between faith and reason. To question taboo. To reframe Jocasta and Antigone as survivors rather than victims. Women unafraid of their power or desire. Caught in a web woven by weak men who have offended the Gods. Tensions between reason and religion reinforcing old binaries. Carr’s cartoon, comic book gods not complicating spiritual ideas so much as confusing them. Tutting like Shakespeare’s witches and dressed like low budget supervillains, Jane Brennan's Queen of the Furies, Catherine Walsh’s Sphinx, Amy Conroy's Moon and Jolly Abraham's Godwoman are all comedy, no tragedy. Abrahams’s nimble leap onto a table evoking Cheetah from Wonder Woman 1984. Talk of blood laws and blood crimes absent Sophocles’ unedited mythology, or a workable alternative, leaves Carr’s introspections sounding like vague Ron L. Hubbard. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, with the original script trimmed to fit. The same ideas repeated over and over till it feels like brainwashing. Olwen Fouéré’s soulless Shee, a crone come high priestess, twisting truth to suit her purpose. If the gods are spiritual, and that’s up for debate, The Shee is religion made manifest.

Frank Blake and Eileen Walsh in Marina Carr's The Boy. Image, Ros Kavanagh

As The Boy begins Sophocles’ three plays of moral complexity are reduced to morality plays of questionable morals. In which paedophile king Laius, a delightfully sleazy Frank McCusker, brings a curse down on Thebes after raping a young boy without his father’s permission. Laius doomed to be murdered by his son, Oedipus, as punishment, who will then marry his mother, Queen Jocasta. So the prophecy goes, and one murder later bride and groom live happily ever after and see Thebes thriving. Until the gods get grumpy over people not believing in them anymore. Offended by Frank Blake’s hobbled country bumpkin Oedipus, who tries unconvincingly to pass himself off as a man God. Looking like a little boy lost next to Eileen Walsh’s sensational and sensual Jocasta.

Frank McCusker and Olwen Fouéré in Marina Carr's The Boy. Image, Ros Kavanagh

The first Act delivers much. The fight between Oedipus and Laius, and Oedipus’s first meeting with Jocasta grounding action and language in an engaging realism; McCusker, Blake and Walsh each riveting. Yet Act Two resorts to prolonged monologues as Carr pronounces a half baked mythology of half baked ideas. Freud and Joseph Campbell never too far away as Carr proves she’s no John Moriarty when it comes to remaking myths. Worse follows as Oedipus rattles on at length against the taboo of incest, debating whether he and Jocasta knew they were related. Carr getting her ducks in a row to investigate incest sees paedophilia inadvertently bask in reflected semi-acceptance. What’s good for the tabooed goose sounding good for the tabooed gander. Only Jocasta, displaying precision and economy, generates anything resembling real power as Walsh moves from the spoken to something that pounds and pulsates through the body. But by then characters have to make a mad dash for the finish line as there’s an outstanding blinding that needs to be executed. The Boy, drained of tension, ending in a flash of dissatisfaction rather than a need to be continued.

Éilish McLaughlin and Frank Blake in Marina Carr's The God and His Daughter. Image, Ros Kavanagh

Two, or twenty four hours later, depending on your choice, The God and His Daughter opens, as with The Boy, with references to the stories we tell ourselves. Here a blind Oedipus bemoans his sons over the grave of the Queen of the Furies. Refusing to return to Thebes, he seeks protection from Abdelaziz Sanusi’s cooler than cool Theseus. Meanwhile daughter, Antigone, begrudgingly administers to his care. Carr’s abridged reimagining resurrecting Jocasta so as to rinse and repeat tepid arguments familiar to The Boy. And so it goes, and goes. Oedipus harangued by Seán Mahon’s Creon professes he wants to die. Finally he obliges, leaving everyone else to return to Thebes.

Seán Mahon and Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty in Marina Carr's The God and His Daughter. Image, Ros Kavanagh

Saving the best and worst till last, Éilish McLaughlin's invigorating Antigone seeks to bury her brother despite being ordered by newly kinged Creon not to. Assertions to kingship providing richer meat as young activist Antigone demands the crown from old conservative Creon, who instigates her inevitable demise. The cost being his own activist son, Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty's Haimon, doomed to die as history repeats itself. The moral seeming to be never to have kids. McLaughlin and Mahon creating genuine friction in energised political combat. Carr’s feminism far stronger than her confused religious ramblings, even as it recycles well worn patriarchal tropes. Religion revisited with false relief as The Shee’s drab final speech suggests a natural end. Only to be immediately followed by a tagged on, Anne Rice, fan fiction styled epilogue to anthropologically recap everything once again, presumably for the benefit of those who missed the first show. Zara Devlin wasted as a questioning interviewer to a vampiric Jocasta who reveals a few mildly interesting new details. Tedium reinforced by yet another final scene as the Queen of the Furies confronts Oedipus in limbo leading to another snappy yet dissatisfying ending. Neither additional scene adding anything that could not have been inserted elsewhere with more economy. The experience shifting from durational to dragging it out. In Greek tragedy it’s the characters, not the audience, who are meant to suffer an eternity.

Éilish McLaughlin in Marina Carr's The God and His Daughter. Image, Ros Kavanagh

Under Caitríona McLaughlin's impressive direction The Boy’s religious and psychological ramblings are elevated into a visual and audial spectacle. The theatrical equivalent of a big budget, special effects, superhero blockbuster. Only Carr’s The Boy proves to be Madame Web and not the original Wonder Woman. Tonnes of impressive visuals and sounds courtesy of Catherine Fay’s shoeless costumes, Jane Cox’s masterful lighting, Carl Kennedy's evocative composition and sound design and Dick Straker's multilayered video design. Cordelia Chisholm's extraordinary set scrubbing The Boy up nicely. Swishing curtains, shifting walls, descending screens and roof projections you can barely make out from the back of the auditorium evoke a myriad of cultural references from Beckett to Beetlejuice. Endless explosions of light and sound crafted into beautiful stage images by McLaughlin always magnificent to behold. Full marks there. It’s pure spectacle. But is spectacle enough?

Eileen Walsh and Frank Blake in Marina Carr's The Boy. Image, Ros Kavanagh

Who’d want to work at The Abbey? Where you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t and damned for not doing it different. Taking the gamble that The Boy was worth its five year delay to become Carr’s crowning achievement rather than her biggest bomb. A box office bonanza and not a critically acclaimed flop. Guaranteed to reignite the debate as to whether we've had too much of The Abbey’s Senior Associate Playwright who appears to have enjoyed more productions in recent years (ten at a quick reckoning, nine at The Abbey) than any other female playwright. Some believing it‘s time to invest in other voices with challenging things to say. Especially considering the money spent on The Boy. A counter argument goes that if you want The Abbey to develop more new works give them more money. To which the reply might be, if this is how you spend the money you have, why should you be trusted with more?

Amy Conroy and Catherine Walsh in Marina Carr's The Boy. Image, Ros Kavanagh

There is only us and the stories we tell, Carr repeatedly states. With plays like The Mai, Portia Coughlan and On Raftery’s Hill, Marina Carr has given Irish theatre some of its most critically important stories, her name indelibly written into the canon of great Irish playwrights. Yet with The Boy Carr goes to the Greek well once too often. Stripping Sophocles’ trilogy of its essence and making it a coat tail on which to hang far less engaging subject matter. If Shakespeare is right, and there’s more under heaven than our philosophy can dream of, The Boy is never more than philosophy. Explaining instead of experiencing, and not explaining itself very well. Still, it's gorgeous to look at. And you don’t have to see both shows. If you decide you want to see both, you can see both together on certain days or separately on different nights.

So, bomb or bonanza? What will the theatre gods decide? Will the audience think The Boy worth the investment of their time, effort and money? Does The Boy speak to, or for them? If not, who does it speak to?

That’s the gamble, isn’t it? Not just for The Boy, but for theatre.

The Boy, a two play theatrcial event written by Marina Carr, based on Sophocles' Theban Trilogy, runs at The Abbey Theatre as part of Dublin Theatre Festival 2025 until November 1.

For more information visit Dublin Theatre Festival 2025 or The Abbey Theatre