By the Bog of Cats

by Marina Carr

Set in the mysterious landscape of the bogs of rural Ireland, Carr's lyrical and timeless play tells the story of Hester Swane, an Irish traveller with a deep and unearthly connection to her land. Tormented by the memory of a mother who deserted her, Hester is once again betrayed, this time by the father of her child, the man she loves. On the brink of despair, she embarks on a terrible journey of vengeance as the secrets of her tangled history are revealed.

'A piece of poetic realism steeped in the past... Carr has an extraordinary ability to move between the mythic and the real.' Guardian

'A great play... a great work of poetry... the word should soon carry across both sides of the Atlantic.' Independent

By the Bog of Cats premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1998. It was revived at Wyndham's Theatre, London, in November 2004.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Irish Literature, Fiction, Theatre, Ireland, School

100 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Marina Carr was brought up in County Offaly. A graduate of University College Dublin, she has written extensively for the theatre. She has taught at Villanova, Princeton, and currently teaches in the School of English, Dublin City University. Awards include the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Macaulay Fellowship, the E. M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Wyndham Campbell Prize. She lives in Dublin with her husband and four children.

Reviews

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two things: This play is DARK, and the GHOST FANCIER has just enough CREEP!

Oh Hester....WHAT you did!

Hester is a wild one who hankers to spend her life on the bleak landscape BY THE BOG OF CATS yearning for her crazy long lost mother. She dearly loves her seven year old daughter Josie and her child's father Carthage....whom she refuses to give up without a fight.

Cat-Woman is her crazy friend with a taste for mice and vision enough to give fair warning, "leave this place now or you never will."

Mostly though, crazy Hester is a loaner with enemies and a life filled with abandonment, betrayal, deadly secrets and guilt....most of all guilt.

Outrageously crazy, ghastly and nasty well-done characters....and don't forget....DARK!

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the many reasons I love Irish lit is that its signature fusion of comedy and tragedy is something I find so shockingly, painfully honest. I love reading something that has me laughing out loud on one page, and has me covering my mouth in horror on the next. Mastering that tonal shift is a fine line to walk, but Marina Carr manages it with aplomb here.

By the Bog of Cats is a play about a traveller woman called Hester, who feels a deep connection with the bog she lives on, but who's being forced to leave because her former partner is now marrying a younger woman and the two of them forced Hester to sign over the rights to her property. Throughout the course of the play we see Hester defend her relationship to the land, while she's also tormented by memories of the mother who abandoned her.

Though there are more than a fair share of comedic moments, the heart of By the Bog of Cats is pitch-black, and the conclusion is absolutely harrowing. It's also a deliberate nod to Greek tragedy, and I am nothing if not predictable. I absolutely loved this. I read it in an hour this weekend, but I'd love to see it performed live one day. Until then, I can only recommend the script very highly to those who love stories which are in turns shocking, disturbing, and darkly funny.

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loosely based on Medea, Carr's version is a stage worthy vehicle in its own right, although it sometimes bogs (sorry/not sorry!) down in repetitiveness, and is confusing in parts. It would have been interesting to see the 2004 London revival starring Holly Hunter, if nothing else to see if she could pull off the Irish accent.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very dramatic and interesting Irish play. It was quite dark and sad and I really liked that. I'd definitely recommend it.

[Ida · Rating 5 out of 5]

phenomenal

[emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fucking brilliant. I didn't know which 'myth' the reviews/reviewers were referring to, and I'm thankful for that because I only picked up on it towards the end of the play (and it was such a glorious surprise). Darkness with a lovely touch of comedy - my favourite. Also, I did read this in my awful Irish accent, trying to sound like Saoirse Ronan and Hozier but nothing like any of them at all. Made me miss Ireland. Oh dear Ireland. Had only great moments there. Got a proper job offer (bartender) on my first night there after downing a sweet pint - you can say as the hopeless romantics call it - a bloody love at first sight. Will return some day. Also, I'm definitely going to read more of Carr's work. You know when you've experienced something amazing - and then it sticks to you like a sticky chewing gum in your mind (and you know it's going to take a good amount of time before it goes away)? This one is surely one of those things.

[Abigail Adams · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had to read this for class so I’ll be darned if I don’t get to count it

[Tully Moran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hester, Catwoman, Monica, Josie, Black Wing, the Bog- all gifts. Mystical writing, believable dialogue. Will run to it if I ever see a production of "By the Bog of Cats" in my proximity.

[Mark Woodland · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a curious play.... but one worth reading, and one that does read well on its own (though if you have a chance to see a production, don't pass it up). Set in the midlands of Ireland in a small town by, as the title says, the Bog of Cats, it features a cast of strong individual characters, with very distinct desires and agendas of their own. This sets up a nice interweaving of conflicts; two characters can both be said to be "against" another, but for completely different reasons. Each scene crackles with wit and utterly snide exchanges, greatly enjoyable. The play is also deeply connected with Irish folk tale & legend, and best personified in the character of the mysterious Catwoman, a blind "seer" and mystic who lives with hordes of cats and eats mice herself (there's a line referring to mouse hair sticking out from between her teeth that's just hilarious). In the end, though, this is a black comedy. The ending is sudden, dark, and very unexpected. I wouldn't want to give it away by saying more. This is a play that you likely will not currently find in a bookstore due to its relative newness; it will probably end up in anthology some day. In the meantime, ordering it directly, finding it in the library or borrowing it is your best bet.

[Mel Rose (Savvy Rose Reads) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Updated review: I had to reread this play for another literature class, and I can confidently say that I loved it just as much the second time around. If you are a fan of dark literature, you absolutely must read this, and read it immediately.

If all of my english class readings were like this, I would be a very happy person. Riveting, demented, dark, and just a little bit disturbing: all in all a fantastically entertaining read. I got through it all in one sitting, partly because I had nothing else to do and it was short, and partly because I couldn't put it down. The dialogue was surprisingly hilarious in parts, and heart breaking and dark when it needed to be. If you're a fan of Irish literature, plays in general, or dark and disturbing things, I HIGHLY recommend this...and if you have to read it for an english class, like me, don't despair!

[Callum Morris-Horne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loosely based on Euripides’ Medea and set beside the bleak boglands of rural Ireland, this play tells the tragedy of Hester Swane — a gypsy woman who is tortured by the spectre of a mother who abandoned her. On the day her longtime lover and father of her daughter is set to marry another woman; with this union threatening Swane’s hold on her home and child, she kindles the fires of revenge which bring her bloody, buried past to the surface of the titular bog. Anyone who knows Medea, knows this won’t end well, but Carr’s reincarnation offers deviant surprises, plenty of pathos and a few chuckles to boot. I hope this is revived on the stage again; the writing is incantatory and brims with occult elements, from witchcraft to catwomen, to omens and ghosts, and I love that shit.

[Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could talk about this play forever. I often think about it - its commentary on names, the ascendancy class in Ireland, women's rights when it came to be married/unmarried, and land ownership.

Through Hester, Carr changes the narrative of Medea - by killing her child, Hester violently destroys the cycle women are trapped in through violence. Choice is crucial in this play. Hester is stripped of her agency by Xavier and Carthage, stripped of access to her child, and her land is being taken from her. Hester killing Josie gives her agency, but at the greatest cost to herself. Does she feel she has a choice when all other options to regain control over Carthage and her land have been barred from her? She can't be an unmarried mother who owns some land, once she has 'married' Carthage her land is forfeited to him; however, even this space is being taken over by the new class and social structures, where is she to go? In fact, the only way in the new class structure that she can own land is by killing her brother, her father's heir. I don't really have much in the way of collected or coherent thoughts at the moment about this, just little questions. Since I have read this in my post-colonial literature course it has stayed with me - myth seems to be a good way to express the post-colonial landscape in both ways of the material being familiar and the so-called timelessness (or absence of linear time) in myth.

[Sarah Pitman · Rating 5 out of 5]

DEVESTATING as someone who had never read Medea before...whew. The imagery in this play is so stark and beautiful. It's absolutely cutting and yet still at some points humorous. Oh I'd love to see this done.

[Kevin (Irish Reader) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this play for my english class and really enjoyed it! I'm slightly confused by the last line but I still enjoyed it!

[Adelle R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Syrovější než Medea, ale ta se mi asi přece jen líbila trochu víc. :)

[Bia · Rating 5 out of 5]

another one of those what-is-wrong-with-the-Irish

[Maddie Margioni · Rating 4 out of 5]

spooky bog drama? yes pls. great retelling of a classic greek myth

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny, bleak, and tragic.

[Julie Brochmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

get your revenge queen

[John Pistelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like many a literary work of the so-called postmodern period, Marina Carr's famous 1998 play By the Bog of Cats is a critical echo chamber of prior texts, whether near or far in space and time from its setting in the Irish midlands in the late 20th century. The literature of prior eras lacked neither for influences nor allusions, but postmodern writers call on precursors neither to buttress their own intellectual authority (à la Dante or Milton) nor to stabilize their otherwise unwieldy subject matter (à la Joyce or Eliot). The postmodern writer, especially if she also construes herself as a postcolonial or a feminist writer, echoes earlier texts with an attitude of critical scrutiny—to discover what went wrong, allusion as (per Adrienne Rich) "diving into the wreck."

As in all the best plays, By the Bog of Cats begins as late as possible in the action and leaves us to assemble the complex background from hints and clues. Our protagonist is 40-year-old Hester Swane, an Irish Traveller who lives in the desolate environs of the the eponymous bog ("[a] bleak white landscape of ice and snow") and who has never gotten over her abandonment by her legendarily grand and grotesque mother, Josie ("a big rancorous hulk" but "gentle...in her way," her children judge). Hester has a daughter, also named Josie, with the decade-younger Carthage Kilbride. She has had a passionate affair, now ended, with Carthage since his late teens, as she unceremoniously informs his new fiancée: "It was in my bed he slowly turned from a slavish pup to a man..."

As the play opens, Carthage is about to be married to Caroline, daughter of a local landowning family headed by Xavier Cassidy. Xavier predictably despises Hester for her Traveller background and wants her run out of town, even as he hypocritically denies his own past longing for her wild mother.

The play's three-act structure centers on Carthage and Caroline's wedding, with the first act as prelude establishing the characters and conflicts, the second act dramatizing the chaotic wedding feast disrupted by Hester, and the third act showing the destructive aftermath that culminates in the horrific act that has led audiences and critics to see By the Bog of Cats as a latter-day Medea. Through the explosive vernacular dialogue of the central characters, the violence in everyone's past comes to light, from Hester's fratricide to the death of Caroline's brother from embracing the corpse of his strychnine-poisoned dog, maliciously killed and dumped in the bog by Xavier.

Around these over-the-top central revelations orbits a company of raucously eccentric side characters. We meet the aged, addled, and randy priest, Father Willow; Carthage's outrageously conceited mother, Mrs. Kilbride, who wears white to his wedding and protests, "How was I supposed to know the bride'd be wearin' white as well"; the Catwoman, a blind seer who laps wine from a saucer at the wedding feast and talks to the spirits of the dead characters (she has one of the play's best deadpan lines: "Ah Christ, not another ghost"); and the confused Ghost Fancier, who comes to claim Hester's spirit at the beginning of the play, too early for her appointed time.

Hester's indomitable assertion of her individuality and right to her own family and territory against the encroachments of respectable capitalist society is the play's chief charm, along with its delirious tone. She cries:

I was born on the Bog of Cats and on the Bog of Cats I’ll end me days. I’ve as much right to this place as any of yees, more, for it holds me to it in ways it has never held yees. And as for me tinker blood, I’m proud of it. It gives me an edge over all of yees around here, allows me see yees for the inbred, underbred, bog-brained shower yees are.

In this speech. she articulates another characteristic trope of postmodern writers who consider themselves postcolonialist and feminist, derided by some as merely the Nobel Savage redux: the social margin as place of superior vision. Considering herself essentially native to the bog despite not possessing it as property in a way Xavier can understand, she knows "where the best bog rosemary grows and the sweetest wild bog rue" and enters the play dragging a dead swan, Black Wing, in whose nest her mother laid her as a child, because "Swane means swan." We don't have to wonder long if she put on its knowledge with its power.

In line with my allusion, Melissa Sihra's essay "A Cautionary Tale: Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats (in the Norton Critical Edition of Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama), enumerates some of the textual ghosts haunting this already specter-ridden play, beyond even its obvious debt to Euripides. There is, Sihra points out, Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan, modern Irish drama's most famous evocation of Mother Ireland as spiritual exile calling on her sons to sacrifice themselves for her honor, recast in Carr's drama as an exile among exiles, an Irish Traveller demonized as a witch by the money- and respectability-minded settled community around her; there is Synge's Playboy of the Western World , a model of boisterous tragicomedy about the clash between primal and modern ways, here re-written from a female perspective; there is Beckett, artist of abstraction, whose atopic settings Carr relocalizes to a specified Irish community while letting them, in the figure of the bog, retain their status as "place and non-place"; and, crossing the Atlantic, there is Hawthorne, who also dramatized a woman named Hester cast out as a Jezebel by her pious community in The Scarlet Letter . To Sihra's brilliant list, I would add only that Carr must have been thinking, too, of Beloved , another late work that rewrites the literary tradition from the perspective of maternity in extremis, this to restore the margin to centrality, to call beloved what was not beloved.

The above takes care of theory, but does the play work qua play? While it's theatrically successful and a widely-taught contemporary classic, reader reviews online suggest its ferocity can be polarizing. I myself first heard of the play at a party where two academics specializing in Irish literature were trying to explain it to the rest of the company: "There's murder! Incest! Infanticide!" they exclaimed almost in unison—except that one loved the play and the other hated it. Someone pointed out that they were saying the same words in two very different tones of voice.

I have no problem with the subject matter as such, but some of the extreme action felt undermotivated to me. The play's comedy allows us to suspend disbelief by removing the whole proceeding to a realm of farce or fancy—and a pile-up of extraordinarily violent events in fiction and drama often becomes slapstick—but then this interferes with the more concrete political points being made. I simply couldn't square Hester's climactic act of brutality with anything we'd seen of her character before, nor could I justify it with reference to anything that had been done to her by others. She sees herself as fated, unable to act of her own volition. She explains of a shocking murder she committed before the play begins, one that foreshadows her violence at its conclusion: "Somethin' evil moved in on me blood..." Here the contrast with Beloved is decisive: Sethe doesn't know if she did the right thing, but she knows—and we know—perfectly well why she did it.

Like Carr, I also sometimes write stories in the heightened manner Hawthorne defended as "romance," so I know that the reply to this kind of criticism is to charge the critic with an unimaginatively conservative attachment to realism or a touching faith (at this late date!) in human or cosmic rationality. All the same, we can't totally abandon story and character logic for sensationalism, nor fall back for motivation on the excuse of fate, as if we were the 5th-century Athenians rather than just admiring them. The romantic, the fantastic, the gothic, magical realism—all of these genres should make sense on their own terms and not just be a warrant for anything goes. The latter is what I see at the end of Carr's drama, no matter how explicable as an homage to the classics.

To be honest, I could criticize Euripides on the same grounds while I'm at it. Medea concludes with the chorus's provocative assertion that the gods never bring the expected to pass, which is true enough; in Bog, the erotic rivals Hester and Caroline echo this skepticism in a moving moment of commiseration:

CAROLINE. None of it was how it was meant to be, none of it.

HESTER. Nothin' ever is, Caroline. Nothin'.

But Medea's murdering her children is so disproportionate to the provocation—and was, some scholars argue, Euripides's own addition to the myth—that we might legitimately see the tragedy as a decline from the heights of Aeschylus and Sophocles, in whom, as Hegel told us, the tragic protagonists embody live ethical forces. Medea is simply not justified in her action as Orestes or Antigone are.

By the Bog of Cats, then, may be better in theory than in practice. Then again, drama is not simply literature: the proper practice isn't reading but performance. I could imagine the play staged variously to make the tone, if not the characterization, cohere, from mournful rite to romping farce. The aforementioned Hegel also recommends somewhere that plays should not be printed at all, since their only true life is onstage.

[gaby · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 but i like the title so i rounded up

[frankngrrl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for class. Phenomenal, insane, twisted and disgusting

[Avery Leahy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw it coming and it still made me cry

[Sophie Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read many, many Irish plays in my time at college, but this one is hands-down my favourite.

Something about the content is utterly hair-raising and plays upon highly emotive themes of land and identity, all the while rooting it in a sort of conflict between wilderness and society.

They're playing it at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin around my birthday this August and I am already looking forward to going to see it.

[Alex Robertson · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

[Cori · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Play discussion group script #34)

[Dean S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dark gem of a play, Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats is both a reinvention of Medea and very much its own beast. The plot follows Hester, an Irish Traveller returned to her life on the Bog of Cats where she grew up, and the coming marriage of her former lover, Carthage. Caught in the crossfires of Hester's attempts to get Carthage back — if only so that he'll let her stay on the Bog where her mother disappeared — is Josie, their seven-year-old daughter. On the fringes is the Catwoman, a local mystic and wise woman who predicts that this will all end in blood, and far too many signs pointing to Hester's death. And in Hester's arms as the play opens is a dead black swan, a sure sign of ill to come.

By the Bog of Cats is a harrowing, constantly twisting story — though it takes some of its elements from the tale of Medea, Hester is very much her own woman, refusing to be hounded by a previous story. She's constantly haunted by the ghosts of her past, and the strange attention of the Ghost Fancier, an unnamed man who can see the spirits that Hester can only speak to. Nevertheless, the story ends with the ultimate choice being made — when Josie, finding her mother with a fishing knife and contemplating killing herself, says she'll always want to go where Hester leads, Hester kills her. "It's only 'cause you wanted to come." She then asks the Ghost Fancier to kill her, and the man plucks her heart from her breast, leaving her as dead as the black swan she carried at the start of the play.

A constantly twisting meditation on death, abandonment, and motherhood, with a pinch of black humor. 3.5-4/5

[armin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the first time I was reading a play by Carr and that’s wow! A modern day Medea which is greatly intertwined with the modern notion of land ownership, while managing to maintain its touch of classical fantasy without sounding weird and out-of-place.
Hester is a woman who has experienced, and continuous to experience, a number of episodes of loss and is greatly touched by them while trying to fight tooth and nail to avoid further ones or repeating them in her own life, specially when it comes to her daughter.
It’s interesting to see almost everyone is guilty, as they all have some stains in their past except for Caroline (and well, Monica and Catwoman who matter very little I think!) who yearns to be happy and protective.
The class issue and the environmental history is crucial here where families seek marriage in order to consolidate their grip on properties - meaningfully is in the bogs.

[Fa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats masterfully draws on Euripides’s Medea to create a contemporary tragedy that explores the themes of fate, abandonment, and the malevolent mother archetype. Through the character of Hester Swane, Carr examines how these themes transcend time and culture, highlighting the universal aspects of women’s experiences and suffering. The play disrupts the traditional structures by granting her main character with agency (just like Euripides did with Medea), who can decide and act at will, even when there are prophecies or curses involved; motherhood is showed in a bad light as the main characters, who have children, are known for having an unhealthy or a null relationship with their own progeny. The mother-child relationship is tainted by generational trauma and the rejection of the nurturing and passive role of a mother imposed by society.

[Alena · Rating 4 out of 5]

TW: suicide, child abuse, alcoholism, child neglect, murder, self-harm, sexual assault

Where do I even start with this play? It is definitely a lot. Very heavy hitting. But I like the circularity of the play. It definitely has a few plot twists you don't see coming. I though I knew how this was ending... boy was I wrong.

The characters are... something?? I really enjoyed the fantastical elements of this play. I still haven't fully processed it but uhm... it's a lot.