I was a member of the actors’ co-operative that produced Marina Carr’s first play, Low in the Dark. With astonishing confidence, the 25 year old Marina came in every morning to our rehearsal space, a freezing near-derelict warehouse in Temple Bar, with two or three typed pages of freshly-minted script for us to work on. We knew from the start that her talent was extraordinary, her comic touch was black and biting, her insight into the play’s theme, the gulf between the sexes, was informed by a bleak wisdom that was outrageously way beyond her years. Since then of course I’ve watched her career progress with a great deal of satisfaction, although living abroad I have not seen as much of her work as I would have liked.

It was with high hopes that I went to see Woman and Scarecrow at the Peacock, especially given the mouth-watering cast that included Olwen Fouéré, Barbara Brennan and Bríd Ní Neachtain. Knowing the play was addressing death, I was confident that given Marina’s rich knowledge of myth and loss, I would find myself challenged and disturbed.

Right from the start, one has to cope with the accent, the wogious midlands drone, flat, unrelenting, as dreary as bogland. It alienates, deliberately – and I don’t mean that this Jackeen doesn’t understand or can’t relate to it, I mean that each character is tied by phonetics into a specific geographical area, the bogs east of the Shannon, and by colloquiallisms into a specific time, an Ireland that is long gone. But, because the style is not natural realism, we know this isn’t a story about quirky Tullamore folk from the fifties. Audiences relax when they see and hear the familiar, but the tension created by the contrived nature of Carr’s world can serve to heighten awareness and catch one by surprise with powerful emotions, offering a rich wry perspective on life. When I saw By the Bog of Cats in the West End, with Holly Hunter, I found myself shaken to the core, blasted by a fierce grief, despite having been constantly irritated by Hunter’s inability to master the accent, and, in retrospect, the directorial insistence that it was that specific Offaly brogue or bust. I attributed the power of the piece to the script, and also to Hunter’s emotional commitment to the piece. And it was also wonderfully funny.

Visually, this production is stunning; the set design is by Conor Murphy. It opens with a home movie of the young Woman, a girl in a red coat playing on the seashore, projected onto a scrim; then, as it grinds open, sounding like the gates of Hell, she dances across the stage, one of the most beautiful openings of any show I’ve seen in a long time. There is a wonky bed set high on an indoor snowdrift, and lying langorously in it, there’s the Woman, Olwen Fouéré, dying of spite, bickering with her alter-ego/guardian angel/dream lover/Scarecrow, Barbara Brennan. Death is waiting in the wardrobe, growling, “making a bracelet out of infant ankle bones”. And immediately, we’re right in it. This is quintessential Carr, clever, unapologetic, caustic, pugilistic, absurd, bitter, merciless. We have to figure it all out for ourselves. We must banish all memories of Tom Murphy’s Bailegangáire – an impossible task, really, for Siobhán McKenna’s swansong as the dying bedridden Mommo is still etched in my heart after over twenty years.

Woman and Scarecrow is inhabited by unashamedly one-note characters, as if tightly bound into corsets of wrought iron, squeezing out all sentimentality, maturity, and hope. The message is that life is brutalizing, rancorous and toxic. Compassion is absent. Happiness is baffling, self-awareness brings no relief from twisted complexes. Self-examination is forensic, pathological, in the detached sense of an autopsy report; in Woman and Scarecrow, there is no enthusiasm or life force or joie-de-vivre waiting to be undammed, no redemptive cathartic release is possible, to go pulsing through the heart after the knotted tourniquet of hate is untied. In the Woman’s arteries, after a life spent using up everything she had giving everyone else what they wanted, there is only venom. These characters are already dead, ghosts of themselves. But even the word ghost is grossly inappropriate – ghost comes from the word for spirit, life, breath. Looking for life? Move along. There’s nothing to see here.

Woman asks at one stage “When did it all turn to tragedy, Scarecrow? When did I stop lampooning the world, and why?” In some ways this is Carr speaking – she has given up the ghost in this play, and, casting her cold eye on life, it’s as if she has immersed it in liquid nitrogen with her gaze, and shattered the resulting brittle shapes with an icepick. Woman and Scarecrow is cadaverous. Beckett, in comparison, had a deep rich humour that enabled us to mine existential depths with his characters. Carr’s humour, however, is in her sophisticated wordplay, a barrage of pithy ironic complaints, that gives us no room to catch our breath. By the time death comes in the end, (for of course death comes in the end) and Woman and her Scarecrow/Ghost Mother arrange themselves for us in a posed and dismaying still life portrait, my heart was as cold as marble.

This is an analysis of a failed marriage, a self-sacrificial suffocated woman and a philandering husband, a marriage that was a façade for procreation. A study of the gangrenous effects of a girl losing a mother, herself self-loathing and bitter, too early in life. A portrait of a stifling repressed community. It is a reflection on lives unlived. It is played with bravery and total commitment by all the cast, but the absence of subtext in each character poses severe challenges for even the most talented of actors. In particular, I was struck by Barbara Brennan’s compelling physicality, agile and angular, and Olwen Fouéré’s astonishing capacity to bare all, emotionally as well as physically, always impresses.

The one moment of aching loss that I felt in the evening is not in the script – director Selina Cartmell had Barbara Brennan move hauntingly across the stage, as the Woman is describing to the redoubtable Auntie Ah (Bríd Ní Neachtain) her last memory of her long-dead mother, and in that moment something shifted for me. But it was fleeting, over in an instant, a hint of what might have been.

I left the theatre as bitterly disappointed as the Woman herself, with the confusing relief of leaving a morgue, albeit a strangely beautiful one. Not wanting to say goodbye, because I still hoped in some way that, if I could stay long enough, I would see a flicker of life in the corpse, some flash of recognition, some insight about life that would enrich or comfort me. Like the Woman herself, I had no such luck.

I reviewed this production with Pavel Barter of the Sunday Times on Nadine O’Regan’s show The Kiosk on Phantom FM.