By the Bog of Cats

At least the title doesn’t give rise to false expectations: with a play uncompromisingly called By the Bog of Cats, you hardly expect it to be a boulevard comedy, but rather something far more bleak, dark and probably dank. And you’d be right. In what has to be the least commercially alluring title of this or any year, it’s a brave producer who boldly puts it on the marquee of a commercial West End house.

But Sonia Friedman and her co-producers Mark Rubinstein and the American team of Waxman Williams Entertainment who are gracing the outside of Wyndham’s Theatre with it, luckily have a couple more words to hope to draw the punters with: Holly Hunter.

The Oscar-winning star of The Piano joins such previous Friedman imports to the London stage as Madonna, Matthew Perry, Minnie Driver, Woody Harrelson and Gillian Anderson, but this time she comes with an extensive stage pedigree, including a previous appearance in this play that she first did at San Jose Repertory Theatre in California in 2001. (It was originally produced, without Hunter, at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1998).
Now, as both actress and play make their moodily atmospheric London debuts, you have to admire her commitment to Marina Carr‘s play and her role, and the gutsy conviction she brings to both.

With braided hair and a whisky bottle constantly stored up her trouser leg, she plays Hester Swane, first seen dragging a dead black swan across the stage as it begins and fending off a character billed as ‘the ghost fancier’ – the Grim Reaper, who has arrived too early.

Carr’s play is already signalling the heady stew of portents and symbols that her play is made up of, and soon enough, it introduces us to another elemental soothsayer type character, the blind Catwoman, who warns her: “Hester Swane, you’ll bring this place down by evenin’.”

What gradually emerges is a story of abandonment: deserted by her mother when she was a child, Hester has now been dumped, after 14 years, by the father of her seven-year-old daughter, and he’s now about to marry the local farmer’s daughter. As in Festen, another long table will occupy centre-stage, this time to celebrate a wedding, and once again that celebration will lead to an irrevocable night of reckoning.

While Carr’s play draws rather strenuous parallels between Hester’s predicament and fate and that of Euripides’ Medea, and provides a similarly bruising and gruelling journey for her (and us) to follow, it never achieves the same sense of catharsis as Greek tragedy. But Dominic Cooke‘s finely nuanced production carefully balances the mythic and the realistic on Hildegard Bechtler‘s set that expertly does the same.

A supporting cast of fine Anglo-Irish-American actors that includes Sorcha Cusack as a neighbour, Brid Brennan as the catwoman, Trevor Cooper as the farmer, Gordon MacDonald as Hester’s ex-partner Carthage and Denise Gough as his new partner, provide strongly inhabited support.

– Mark Shenton