“Scratch the surface and underneath is all this savagery”

Marina Carr discusses her ‘dance’ with Euripides’ Hecuba

By Ismail Khalidi

I first met renowned Irish playwright Marina Carr on a mild Dublin afternoon in the Fall of 2022. A longtime admirer of her work, it was no surprise to find her to possess in person the same natural, unforced intelligence that one encounters in her writing. Our conversation was easygoing and wide-ranging, and after several hours we parted ways. On my way to a friend’s Upstairs on the South side of the River Liffey. There, I picked up Carr’s Hecuba, which proved to be one of the most extraordinary things I had read in some time.

The play is, among many other things, a gritty anti-war take on the myth of Hecuba, with Carr putting us in the skin of the much-maligned Trojan queen and re-framing both her and the war on Troy itself.  Carr paints the latter not as a noble, lawful endeavor but rather a genocidal rampage carried out against a more sophisticated civilization by an array of rather barbaric Greek warlords – all under the flimsy pretext of recovering the hostage Helen. Carr’s feats of form and flow, and her subversive twist on (or “dance” with) Euripides’ classic left me speechless.

For months afterwards, I excitedly told everyone about the play, even reading out loud–and often unsolicited–passages to any and all who would listen.  As it happened, my trip to Dublin  was followed by a research trip and residency in France with Pangea World Theater co-artistic directors Meena Natarajan and Dipankar Mukherjee. They were among the first subjected to my ravings about Hecuba. Luckily they were also fond of Carr’s work and knew of the play. We soon found ourselves reading the entire play out loud together between meetings. A couple of months later Hecuba was slated for production as part of Pangea’s 2023-24 season.  

I recently had the pleasure of  connecting with Marina Carr to discuss her play and the world, just as Pangea World Theater’s production (directed by Mukherjee) of the play opened its curtains at the Southern Theatre. Below are some excerpts from my phone conversation earlier this month with the award-winning Carr.  

ISMAIL
What made you turn to Hecuba? What was that spark that made you look at Euripides’ version of Hecuba and decide to kind of turn this on its head? 

MARINA
It was commissioned originally by the RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) and they wanted something ‘classical’. I don’t remember the exact conversations but we decided on Hecuba. Obviously I had read Euripides. I have been fascinated by mythology all of my life and I had read a lot of the myths and had been fascinated by books about the excavations of Troy. 

But you know, the way I would describe it is not so much that it is an adaptation, or my ‘version’, but rather it’s more like me dancing with Euripides’ Hecuba. 

So I was examining and writing against it. With Euripides of course, but also with differences, because there were a lot of things I didn’t agree with in how the Hecuba story was told. Because, of course, it was written by a Greek, and the Greeks were the victors over the Trojans. And obviously they put their own spin on it.  And, well, I thought they had trashed her, really, in a way. So I thought I’d re-examine what might have happened, how it may have gone if we don’t completely believe Euripides’ re-telling of the myth. He is writing in the 5th century BC, talking about a Bronze Age queen, and it is built upon myths that have come down, about that war and before the war and I wanted to take into account how the Greek mind sees all that. 

ISMAIL
So there is an agenda? 

MARINA
They are trying to cement the country, in essence to bring all these warring, disparate tribes together. So there’s a lot of propaganda, understandably, around how they portray themselves, as the victors, and of course as the civilized ones. And how they produce the memory and the images of those they have vanquished. For me, coming from an ex-colony here, I’m able to identify with how narratives are constructed and by whom and for what purpose. There is a narrative about my country, as a colonized and vanquished country. We have a lot of problems around that narrative here in Ireland. So I played with applying that to Troy and Hecuba’s story, and what it is like to be invaded and conquered and slaughtered and sold into slavery.

ISMAIL
Obviously you are well versed in the Greeks, but was there a lot of historical digging and prodding you felt compelled to do?

MARINA
Well I’m no expert, as you know, I am a playwright, but I do have some good friends who are Greek scholars, so I decided they would be my go-to experts for details and I had many sessions with them and they helped give me context and put me right on a lot things and helped me to ground some things. To think about the fact that the Trojans were sophisticated. We’re talking about a wealthy, advanced civilization, a port city with people and things passing through from all over. It was called the city of light before Paris was called the city of light millennia before. So you had this place with libraries and knowledge and you then basically have these barbarians coming in, who can’t read or write, just basically tribesmen, many of whom were at war with each other, who came in with these rivalries and competitions and couldn’t agree on much. 

But in the end it is literature, meaning it is a product of imagination, that produced the earlier written versions of Hecuba and my own imagination and the dance between them, for want of a better word. 

Foreground: Cassandra (Ankita Ashrit) looks down at her younger sister Polyxena (Anne Guadagnino)
Background: Bethany Lacktorin (Composer, Live Musician & Sound Designer),
Tyler Stamm (Odysseus) and Nathan Berglund (Polydorous) acting as the chorus
Pangea World Theater’s production of Marina Carr’s Hecuba, April 2024
Photos by Bruce Silcox

ISMAIL
What I really admire, though, is how you question the victor’s narrative, but not in a way that is facile and predictable. It’s a subtle recalibration, a bringing back down to earth, to the mud and sweat and blood of conquest and war and empire. Of course, the style in which you write the play itself, where we hear the characters think out loud and process what they hear and say out loud. With Agamenon, there is this recognition on his part of how ridiculous and barbaric these practices are that he is taking part in and in fact leading; these rites and rituals of conquest, of sacrifice, of pillage and rape, and the use of it all to justify more pillage, more sacrifice, more conquest etc. “How many more kids do I have to slaughter”, Agamenon says to himself, “to keep these perverts off my back?” Wow. 

What fascinates me is when you’re writing about 500 BC but actually human nature, you know, we haven’t changed … we don’t seem to have evolved very much. Scratch the surface and underneath is all this savagery.

Marina Carr

MARINA
What fascinates me is when you’re writing about 500 BC but actually human nature, you know, we haven’t changed. There is this whole idea, this teleological idea that we’re getting better and better. And I have huge problems with that. Because we’d like to think so, but all the evidence points in the opposite direction unfortunately. I don’t know, we don’t seem to have evolved very much. Scratch the surface and underneath is all this savagery. You see it in terms of the base competition for resources or territory, the instincts that rise to the surface.

I happen to believe ideas are ten a penny. Emotions are not … I think we feel and then we scramble to try and put a bit of language and meaning on to it. So I think we’re much more elemental. We like to think otherwise but the body knows first and then the mind. It comes running to catch up and to try to understand what is happening.  

ISMAIL
I want to ask about the moment of Agamemnon and Hecuba’s encounter in Agamemnon’s tent towards the end of the play. Could you tell us about how you tackled that intimate encounter between this conquering king and this vanquished queen as it were? I can see feminists critiquing it, though, for what it is worth I think there is something incredibly feminist in it, or in your understanding of it. More than that, it feels quite real to me somehow, and human. And moving. Many truths overlapping and cohabitating at once. It resonated when you said the mind catches up to the body. I’m curious to know your thoughts about that scene.

MARINA
Yeah, sleeping with the enemy. It just seemed kind of inevitable to me. You know, you have this queen. And you have this king in Agamemnon, or chieftain or whatever you want to call them, the leader of the army. He is a king, he’s the Spartan King. I think he’s just fascinated by her, by Hecuba, by her civilization, by her bravery I suppose. And I think the attraction is there from the very minute they meet, when he comes into the throne room at the beginning. They kind of clock each other, in the way men and women clock each other. There’s everything else going on as well, but there is that going on too. Her husband has been beheaded, Priam is gone. 

And in that scene, later on, she’s a woman alone, on the beach, and her daughter’s been sacrificed. She’s lost everything. Her sons are dead. All she’s left with is Casandra, her difficult prophetess child. And she’s nothing left to lose. I mean, it’s almost as if she’s dying in that scene. And it is a kind of benediction. And again, the body knowing and the body taking over, and then it is she who is the instigator of the lovemaking. It’s not him, he is almost afraid to go near, afraid it will be construed as him moving in on this vulnerable woman, who is, after all, his captive. And so I do think it is interesting that she instigates that moment. And to me, it shows her power as much as her desperation. In a way it is her letting go, or giving up, giving in to one night of joy and comfort amid all of this sorrow. 

ISMAIL
I love how you don’t shy away from that moment or fall into facile tropes. It is both a surrender as you say, and the kind of embrace of her own humanity and her own desires and her own power. And, and of course, his attraction to her is not just as the vanquishing man-King dominating the powerless woman. Of course, that’s part of it. He has power over her, but you do so much more with that scene, especially with the internal dialogue you wield so astutely. Was it something you had to struggle with in writing the scene?

MARINA
Well it is biological in one sense. I heard a statistic that during times of war the birth rate goes up, and of course there is something very primal in all of us, to keep the species going. When there’s so much death, there has to be so much creation and birth and life and love and sex. It seems to me that they go hand in hand. There’s a certain abandon, where the rules that apply in peacetime do not apply during war. And maybe that’s something to do with it as well. The rule book is kind of thrown out and one lives, one savors the day, because there may not be another one. And I admire that kind of living. I’ve never been in a desperate situation like that. But I could imagine if I was, you know, how would you get through a day as a captive in a tent on the beach, your family dead, your children, your husband. What’s left? There’s nothing, there’s nothing left except … a lit bit of solace and comfort, a letting go, I presume. 

ISMAIL
I want to ask about this moment that we’re in now, with a genocide under way, a horrific and vengeful vanquishing of the “other”. In the play, at the top, as Troy is falling, Hecuba says: “This is not war. In war there are rules, laws, codes. This is genocide. They’re wiping us out.” I don’t know if I really need to expound on why this feels so timely, so crushingly and depressingly relevant right now. 

You mentioned the brutal colonial past in your country. Having written those lines, what are you feeling watching this actual genocide unfold in front of our eyes in Palestine. I guess it’s a big question, but maybe how you relate to it as an Irish person, but also just in relation to this play and this dark side of these human historical processes …

MARINA
Well, it’s shocking you know, the disregard that our leaders have for the dignity and sanctity of human life, it’s shocking to me. And the lies that are being told to justify this, you know, it’s kind of terrifying. And yet familiar. To see all these people, above all these women and children slaughtered, it’s so painful. And then you take the long view, you know, and so much of the history of the world is one of rape, pillage, invasion, conquest, [and] the appropriation of territories and resources. And it seems it’s just wave after wave, and everybody’s turn comes, unfortunately, and once the ball gets rolling, all the diplomacy in the world seems not to matter. You know, we always think our age is the most civilized, but people will look back on us, to this century, and just say, what savagery was allowed to take place, just as we look back in time and remark on the savage notions of and customs of the past. But it seems it is in the DNA, this slaughter and greed and conquering of territory, the discarding of whole populations, even children … And it’s so often done the name of ‘educating’ the locals or the natives and ‘civilizing’ then or ‘democratizing’, but as we know, in Ireland and elsewhere, it is all very often just justification for stealing land and resources.

ISMAIL
I’ve found myself drawn to the description in Hecuba of the bloodlust unleashed among the common soldiers, the lies they’ve been told or the archaic beliefs fueling a genocidal rage. How even today, we see politicians and soldiers harkening to these biblical, mythical proclamations to justify mass killing. And these leaders know full well they’ve created a monster and they’re cynically going through the motions of these ceremonies and sacrifices and speeches knowing that whether it is true or not, it will unleash hell all the same. Your Agamemnon is one nuanced example of that. And this play, in my opinion, exposes how real these myths are at their core, and how crazy and epically f*cked up the present is. 

I think we’re being conditioned to not be able to see or tell the truth anymore. But it is backfiring, at great cost, but in some ways it is.

Marina Carr

MARINA
And I think people see what you are describing. Sadly we don’t have the power, you see, that’s the problem. I think most people on the ground are trying to get it right and can see it all clearly for what it is. Unfortunately, we’re not the ones who make big decisions in the darkened rooms when everybody’s gone home. And you can just see as you know, you see it playing out again and again. And these world leaders, should we call them, who should be setting the best example for the rest of us, are in fact once again doing the opposite. And that fills us all with such despair, or it should. Because, I think we’re being conditioned to not be able to see or tell the truth anymore. But it is backfiring, at great cost, but in some ways it is.  And it’s important to call things as they are, for our children, to name things and to point out the lies so they don’t grow up believing these narratives that devalue truth and life. 

ISMAIL
There is a proverb (popularized by Achebe, I think) that goes: “until the lion learns how to write every story will glorify the hunter”. It seems a moment ripe for us to have to intervene and flip things, and say, ‘let’s clock who is writing history and headlines, and what that means and and what bones lie under the foundations of every palace and every myth.’ You said in a separate interview, about Euripides:  “he was writing his version of a myth … Yet somehow all these archetypes of females are in western consciousness; they are types of women to be feared, they are kind of monsters at the outer reach of femininity and they are all terrifying. This terrible fear of women, the societal need to control and marginalize them, still persists.” Can you talk a bit about that?

MARINA
Yes, yes. We have to call that out. And you know, the myths are great to read for that reason, because it’s all there, it’s all in the mix. You see every disposition, you see the egomaniac, you see the despot, the victim, the kind ones who don’t really get anywhere, the powerful orators. I mean, that’s the wonderful thing about women in the Greek plays, they are such powerful orators, and they’ve been given space to actually speak out. It never really gets them anywhere–gets them killed actually–but they are still there calling it. And we do hear what they’re saying, before their inevitable, tragic demise. And that’s one of the things that I find so compelling and commendable about the three big Greek tragedians, that they give that voice to these women, especially at a time when women were looked at more like chattel, sent from your father’s house to your husband’s. You didn’t even have the same rights over your own children. And in the middle of all this, despite the archetypes, these women somehow shine through, and  you have your Hecubas and your Iphigenias, your Pheadras and your Antigones and your Electras, etc. And that’s very heartening, to know despite all the fear of women and the lies that the powerful tell, these brilliant women, they have been and will continue to be at the foundation of so many of our stories.

Marina Carr is an Irish playwright of over 30 plays, including By the Bog of Cats, The Mai, Ariel, Woman and Scarecrow, as well as adaptations of Lorca’s Blood Wedding and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina among others. She is the recipient of The Irish Times Playwright Award, the E.M. Forster Award, and Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Literature Award. She has taught at Trinity College, Villanova, Princeton, and currently at Dublin City University. Hecuba premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2015. Her most recent play, Audrey or Sorrow recently premiered at the Abbey Theatre. 

Ismail Khalidi is a playwright whose plays include Truth Serum Blues, Tennis in Nablus, Sabra Falling, Dead Are My People and Foot, as well as the adaptation (w/ Naomi Wallace) of Ghassan Kanafani’s novella, Returning to Haifa. Khalidi is a Directing Fellow at Pangea World Theater.