Marina Carr - Girl on an Altar

 Marina Carr. Girl on an Altar. (United Kingdom: Faber and Faber, 2022). 

The play was performed at the Kiln Theatre, London, in May 2022. The play script reads like a radio play, as characters describe what they are doing rather than interacting with each other. I’m curious about how it is staged to make it theatrical. Of interest is Clytemnestra saying to Agamemnon about his sacrifice of Hecuba’s daughter before leaving Troy: 

It’s becoming a habit. Soon it’ll be normal and before you can turn round it’ll be law. Before it was ring giving, ring taking, ships of gold and ships of spices, poets and harpists in a banquet hall. And if sacrifice was wanted it was a calf or a deer. Now it’s girls. The blood of spotless girls these new gods want. What is this terrible new pact among men? I no longer know this man they call Zeus Atrides Agamemnon (p. 35). 

Agamemnon stays alive on his return to Mycenae for some time, taking Cassandra as his wife and dismissing Clytemnestra to the slave quarters, where her daughter by Aegisthus dies. This prolongs the inevitable, increasing the fighting between them. Cassandra bears twins. Her curse temporarily lifts but returns at the end. 

Attention is drawn to the lives of slave women. Perhaps this is the point of the play. On Clytemnestra’s arrival at the harem, she says: 

In all my years at Argos, I never deigned to visit this place. Never gave these lonely neglected women a thought, though I approved the accounts every quarter, so much grain, cloth, wine, kif. Yes, I heard the odd bit of gossip from time to time, generally so-and-so has a healthy son from one of the pleasure women, but never a mention of the girl infants. And here they are, a flock of small girls from ebony black to palest white, half feral, with the weak limbs and dull eyes of those confined too long. The old women lie in their hammocks, wrapped in moulting bear skins, ochre smeared on their toothless mouths, hulk streaming down their ravaged faces. And I think, I have allowed this, this place of forgotten souls where time stands still, never to see God’s good earth and run in the meadows and splash in the streams and know ordinary mortal love. I have allowed all this (pp. 42-43). 

The play includes this exchange between Cassandra and a slave woman: 

Cassandra: Will I ever see them again?

 Cilissa: Do I wear a crown? Don’t be stupid, we’re just their playthings. 

Cassandra: But my children. 

Cilissa: Your children? What about my children? Don’t talk to me about children (p. 56).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Irmgard Keun - After Midnight

Image
First published in Germany in 1937, this short novel tells the story from the point of view of nineteen year old Sanna about her family and friends as Germany is changing. It shows how the political changes impact social changes. The central theme is romance but it is really about how individuals navigate the new rules as the power of the Nazis grows. It is now published as a Penguin Modern Classic, translated by Anthea Bell.  The young women are hanging out in bars more than you might expect for the time period. I like the female references and the humour.  Some extracts: Gerti is washing her swollen eyes. We must go back to our table. My head's full of confused, random thoughts, like a ball of wool I must knit into words. I must knit a stocking of words. It takes so long, and I forget what I was going to say a minute ago, as if I'd dropped a stitch.  ..... Herr Breitwehr believed Frau Silias's story about the fake silver fox fur. So then Frau Breitwehr went off to Godenhe
Read more

Nina MacLaughlin - Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung.

Image
  Nina MacLaughlin. Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung . (USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2019).  This rewrite is better than I had expected. Each story is told using a different form, mostly first person, some dialogue, or third person, mostly set in the ancient past but including modern references, so creating the impression of everywhen. More than thirty stories create the cumulative effect of a chorus. Each form is different. My observation is that the women are all lonely.  I collected many impressive lines. The rewritings that impressed me include Arachne (as an example of weaving); the confusion of Callisto as she transforms into a bear and a constellation; the story of Scylla begins as emails exchanged with her friend Galatea, and the creepy stalker guy Polyphemus, then Circe turns her into a monster in the water with a skirt of dogs where Scylla tries to cope by controlling what she can, her own thoughts; Medusa saying she is lonely; the irony of Egera turning into a spring when she wa
Read more

Dorothy B. Hughes - In a Lonely Place

Image
A crime story in the hard-boiled detective / film noir style set in LA and published in 1947. I'm not giving anything away when I tell you the criminal is the narrator and we, as readers, are in his head. Dix Steele, at a loose end in LA, connects with an old war buddy who is now a police detective on the case of finding a serial killer. As a reader I was intrigued by his psychology, and, to be honest I didn't catch on about some clues as early as I should have. I knew he had to be caught (it's morally right) but I had no idea how. Also, he's kind of charming and cool, and we don't see the details of his crimes, so we can accept him as the people around him accept him. And there's the rub! The women around him are suspicious though, so there's some consolation in that.  I quite liked this: 'Lochner was the tall, thin man. His clothes were a little too big for him, as if he'd loss weight worrying.'  I was quite shocked by the casual cruelty of thi
Read more