Women in spotlight in Marina Carr’s ‘The Mai’

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

“It’s an intense play, but it’s enjoyable because of that,” says actress Rachel O’Byrne of Marina Carr’s drama The Mai.  Rachel plays Millie in this moving work, set in the midlands that centres on four generations of one family of ‘proud mad women’ and how events from the past leave an indelible legacy on the future.

The Mai of the title is a formidable 40-year old woman who has always aimed to live an exceptional life, but is devastated when husband Robert, a musician, abandoned her and their family after 17 years of marriage. She builds a dream house in the hope that he will return and, as the play opens, that’s what happens. But this is not a happy-ever-after scenario.

Mai’s and Robert’s troubled reunion is observed and influenced by memorable family characters who span the generations. Towering over them is the acidic, irreverent matriarch, Grandma Fraochlán whose “ancient and fantastical memory”, is a reminder of how the past looms over the present.

The Mai premiered on the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre in 1994 and this revival by Galway company Decadent is being directed by Andrew Flynn. It’s being performed at the City’s Town Hall Theatre from this Thursday, October 4, to Saturday, October 6, as part of an Irish tour.

Millie, the Mai’s daughter and the narrator of the piece, is onstage throughout, “watching and listening to all of them”, Rachel explains.

“All of them” include Grandma (Stella McCusker), physically frail but with a savagely acerbic tongue, as well as her daughters, Agnes and Julie, played by Joan Sheehy and Marion O’Dwyer. And there’s the Mai, played by Derbhle Crotty. This strong woman, a mother and schoolteacher schoolteacher, is left humiliated by her husband’s infidelity.

Director Andrew Flynn and the cast decided early in the rehearsal process that Rachel would be onstage all through and, from the start, she attended all the rehearsals so that the other actors – six women and one man – would get used to her presence.

“And it was also for me,” Dublin-born Rachel explains, “so I could learn, as a company, how we were presenting this play and telling the story.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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