Mirandolina

Gaja Masciale in Mirandolina by Marina Carr. Image: Serena Serrani.

**

Like The Gate's seasonal Christmas Show, an annual Marina Carr production at The Abbey, directed by The Abbey's artistic director Caitríona McLaughlin, has become something of an unquestioned fixture over the past decade. Carr's work occasionally great, McLaughlin having her good days too. But it bears repeating that no playwright should enjoy that degree of favouritism no matter how good their work, especially at a national theatre. Carr's latest, Mirandolina, suggesting the practice not only has a negative impact on opportunities for others, but possibly on the writer. Like an ape dressed in Armani, Mirandolina appears to be trying to hide an identity crisis behind Italian chic. Mirandolina's polemic against violence towards women challenging callous desensitisation. Even as it’s laboured, cartoon clichés suggest a theatrical multiple personality disorder.

Massimo Scola and Gaja Masciale in Mirandolina by Marina Carr. Image: Serena Serrani.

Following the big-budget lacklustre that was The Boy, Carr shifts from Greece to Italy for her latest source material. Mirandolina, adapted from the 1753 comedy La Locandiera by Carlo Goldoni, originally focused on an innkeeper with a coquettish nature. Goldoni, a contemporary of Mozart, Casanova, and Lorenzo da Ponte, is perhaps best known for his Il servitore di due padroni reimagined as the hugely successful comedy One Man, Two Guvnors. In contrast, Carr's tabloid twist on Goldoni's La Locandiera flips comedy into tragedy with weak results. Written originally in Italian, here translated from English by Monica Capuani back into Italian (employing English surtitles), further compounds the sense of an identity in crisis.

Gaja Masciale and Riccardo Gamba in Mirandolina by Marina Carr. Image: Serena Serran

As does Mirandolina's generational ghost story. Supernatural foreshadowing establishing otherworldly connections to ancestors used as expositional spirits. Sensed beings who move through the world charting a frayed thread more than a through line. Beginning in Italy and ending in a cheap Dublin restaurant, exposition proves mostly decorative. In which Irish sensibilities disappear next to Italian. Despite the Irish location Mirandolina always feels set in Italy. Where cartoon gender polemics play out as four lewd misogynists, with a collective IQ of seven, live out their fifty-cent lives as barroom experts swilling last rounds or sniffing coke. Daily declaiming on the flights, fancies and failings of women and their roles and responsibilities as mothers, virgins and whores. Beginning with Massimo Scola's Fabrizio, an adopted brother who wants to marry Mirandolina. Followed by Riccardo Gamba's Rip, a disdainful bore with no interest in women. Finally Denis Fasolo's Fiori, a loudmouth abuser, and Andrea Tich's Alba, an unquestioning enabler rounding out the village idiots. Meanwhile, Gaja Masciale's vibrant and youthful Mirandolina, researching her feminist thesis on Virginia Woolf, navigates the men's inescapable attentions. Tired of Rip's vilification of women, and of being seemingly immune to her charms, Mirandolina decides to make him fall in love with her so she can break his heart. Only now does something resembling action begin. Yet given the crassness that follows you almost wish it hadn't. A twenty-minute monologue about a gang rape, followed by two unconvincing seduction attempts ends with a groan-inducing descent into Carmen. Taking us right back to where it all began with the feeling you've just been played.

Denis Fasolo and Gaja Masciale in Mirandolina by Marina Carr. Image: Serena Serran

A litany of trauma triggers set against a comic, cartoon reductivism, action is often offset by several spoonfuls of sugared humour to help the trauma go down. Keeping it down proving something of a problem. Under McLaughlin's lacklustre direction, the whole suffers a staid, dull heaviness. McLaughlin's smart, feline slinking opening evoking liminal suggestiveness soon giving way to clichéd slow-motion in blurred, shadowy mists. Paul Keogan's lights working vigilantly to enrich a myriad of real and other spaces, which Katie Davenport's set valiantly tries to realise. But the wide-open restaurant always looks like its sprawling to fill up the stage, the ever-present train track painfully draws attention to itself.

Gaja Masciale and Massimo Scola in Mirandolina by Marina Carr. Image: Serena Serrani.

If Mirandolina were an entry level, educational introduction to issues affecting domestic abuse you might forgive it more. It's not the message that's the problem, it's the medium, which risks undoing the message's impact for looking cartoonish. What elevates and captivates in Mirandolina are its incredibly detailed performances, despite some self-conscious shouting, informed by a heightened naturalism beautiful to behold. At the centre of which is Masciale's Mirandolina, along with Giancarlo Previati as her great-grandfather who steals his scene. Masciale a magnetising presence. A performer who could recite the Bible in Klingon and still make it sing. For long time fans, all the Carr tropes are present: family, history, incest, the supernatural, ridiculous men and exciting women some say are mad, bad and dangerous to know. Even so, theatrically and thematically, Mirandolina falls considerably short of Carr’s better work.

Mirandolina by Marina Carr, after Goldoni, translated by Monica Capuani, runs at The Abbey Theatre until September 5.

Mirandolina is a co-production between the Abbey Theatre (Ireland), Teatro Stabile del Veneto – Teatro Nazionale (Italy), and Croatian National Theatre HNK Rijeka (Croatia). Part of the cultural programme for Ireland's Presidency of the Council of the EU, it premiered in Treviso in February 2026 before touring Italy and Croatia. Women's Aid is the production's charity collaborator.

Performed in Italian with English surtitles.

For more information visit The Abbey Theatre