Staging an Epic Poem for the Twenty-First Century: Marina Carr’s iGirl and the 2021 Abbey Theatre Production
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Klára Witzany Hutková
is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Irish Studies at Charles University, Faculty of Arts, Prague. Her thesis focusses on the theatre of Marina Carr and the cultural heritage of ancient Greece. Other research interests include Irish women writers, especially Maeve Brennan, and Irish folklore. She received an MA in Irish Studies from Charles University and an undergraduate degree in Ancient History from the University of Edinburgh. She was a visiting student at University College Dublin (2021–2022), Trinity College Dublin (2020–2021), and Université de Bourgogne (2013–2014). She is a member of the advisory board of The Protagonist and editorial assistant at Litteraria Pragensia.
Abstract
This article discusses the 2021 Abbey Theatre production of Marina Carr’s monologue play iGirl, which premiered during the COVID-19 pandemic. The play brings together fictitious and historical voices – mostly female – who speak through its only character, Girl (Olwen Fouéré). Adopting the epic genre, it offers a bleak vision of humanity’s past and future. Catherine Fay’s costume, Sinéad Wallace’s lighting, Joanna Parker’s set and video design (the latter with Daniel Denton) emphasise Carr’s focus on marginalised voices but also add a layer of the digital. While the livestreaming of iGirl’s only dialogical scene, along with the presence of a secluded desk on stage, evokes the recent lockdown, Fouéré’s otherwise nonmediated rhapsodic performance in the physical space of the theatre serves as a counter experience. Both the pandemic context, with a heightened reliance on technology to facilitate communication, and Carr’s gender politics are implied by the play’s title. While a lower-case “i” followed by an upper-case letter evokes the digital and/or the Internet, the play’s first-person narrative style is emphasised when iGirl is read as “I, Girl.” Attributing several monologues to a contemporary “Girl,” whose voice partly overlaps with that of Carr, this article identifies her as the titular iGirl.
Note
The article was financially supported by Charles University Grant Agency, project no. 150122, entitled “Giving Voice to the Outsider: Marina Carr’s Revision of the Other of Classical Athens,” Principal Researcher: Klára Witzany Hutková, implemented at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University.
About the author
is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Irish Studies at Charles University, Faculty of Arts, Prague. Her thesis focusses on the theatre of Marina Carr and the cultural heritage of ancient Greece. Other research interests include Irish women writers, especially Maeve Brennan, and Irish folklore. She received an MA in Irish Studies from Charles University and an undergraduate degree in Ancient History from the University of Edinburgh. She was a visiting student at University College Dublin (2021–2022), Trinity College Dublin (2020–2021), and Université de Bourgogne (2013–2014). She is a member of the advisory board of The Protagonist and editorial assistant at Litteraria Pragensia.
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© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Theatre in the Digital Age: Concepts, Perspectives, Developments
- Ecologies of Care in a Digital Age: What Remains After Viral Theatre?
- Mediatization’s Promise and Downfall: Facebook, Our World, and Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love
- “The Future Is Gonna Be Better Than Today”: The Metamodern Theatre of Verbatim Musical Public Domain
- Becoming and Being in Digital and Physical Realms: An Inter- and Transmedial Inquiry into Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy
- Staging an Epic Poem for the Twenty-First Century: Marina Carr’s iGirl and the 2021 Abbey Theatre Production
- Digital Spoken Word Theatre in the UK: Navigating the Theatre Screen with Rose Condo’s The Geography of Me
- Remediations of the Theatre-in-Lockdown Works by Richard Nelson and Forced Entertainment
- #TinyPlayChallenge: Medial, Formal, and Social Affordances of Digital Theatre in Times of Lockdown
- Virtual Realism and Black Feminist World-Building in seven methods of killing kylie jenner by Jasmine Lee-Jones
- Performative Responses to Anti-Asian Hate amid the COVID-19 Pandemic: Digital Activism and Community Building in WeRNotVirus
- Reframing Terrestrial Agency through Digitally Augmented Aesthetics Across Theatre and Installation Art
- Animal Cyborgs Onstage: Audiovisual Technology and Anthropocentric “Immediacy” in Contemporary Anglophone Climate Crisis Theatre
- Ferryman Collective in Conversation with Cyrielle Garson
- Eamonn Jordan. Irish Theatre: Interrogating Intersecting Inequalities (Routledge Studies in Irish Literature). New York: Routledge, 2023, vii + 258 pp., £39.99 (paperback), £135.00 (hardback), £35.99 (ebook).
- Christian Attinger. The Theatre of Philip Ridley: Representations of Globalization in Contemporary British Theatre. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2023. 479 pp., €49.00 (paperback).
- Simon Parry. Science in Performance: Theatre and the Politics of Engagement. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2020, xi + 194 pp., £61.03 (hardback), open access via manchesterhive.com.
- Mireia Aragay, Cristina Delgado-García, and Martin Middeke, eds. Affects in 21st-Century British Theatre: Exploring Feeling on Page and Stage. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, xi + 284 pp., €128.39 (hardcover), €128.39 (softcover), €96.29 (Epub, PDF ebook).
- Jacqueline Bolton. The Theatre of Simon Stephens. London: Methuen Drama, 2021, 264 pp., £90.00 (hardback), £28.99 (paperback), £26.09 (PDF ebook).
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Theatre in the Digital Age: Concepts, Perspectives, Developments
- Ecologies of Care in a Digital Age: What Remains After Viral Theatre?
- Mediatization’s Promise and Downfall: Facebook, Our World, and Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love
- “The Future Is Gonna Be Better Than Today”: The Metamodern Theatre of Verbatim Musical Public Domain
- Becoming and Being in Digital and Physical Realms: An Inter- and Transmedial Inquiry into Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy
- Staging an Epic Poem for the Twenty-First Century: Marina Carr’s iGirl and the 2021 Abbey Theatre Production
- Digital Spoken Word Theatre in the UK: Navigating the Theatre Screen with Rose Condo’s The Geography of Me
- Remediations of the Theatre-in-Lockdown Works by Richard Nelson and Forced Entertainment
- #TinyPlayChallenge: Medial, Formal, and Social Affordances of Digital Theatre in Times of Lockdown
- Virtual Realism and Black Feminist World-Building in seven methods of killing kylie jenner by Jasmine Lee-Jones
- Performative Responses to Anti-Asian Hate amid the COVID-19 Pandemic: Digital Activism and Community Building in WeRNotVirus
- Reframing Terrestrial Agency through Digitally Augmented Aesthetics Across Theatre and Installation Art
- Animal Cyborgs Onstage: Audiovisual Technology and Anthropocentric “Immediacy” in Contemporary Anglophone Climate Crisis Theatre
- Ferryman Collective in Conversation with Cyrielle Garson
- Eamonn Jordan. Irish Theatre: Interrogating Intersecting Inequalities (Routledge Studies in Irish Literature). New York: Routledge, 2023, vii + 258 pp., £39.99 (paperback), £135.00 (hardback), £35.99 (ebook).
- Christian Attinger. The Theatre of Philip Ridley: Representations of Globalization in Contemporary British Theatre. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2023. 479 pp., €49.00 (paperback).
- Simon Parry. Science in Performance: Theatre and the Politics of Engagement. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2020, xi + 194 pp., £61.03 (hardback), open access via manchesterhive.com.
- Mireia Aragay, Cristina Delgado-García, and Martin Middeke, eds. Affects in 21st-Century British Theatre: Exploring Feeling on Page and Stage. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, xi + 284 pp., €128.39 (hardcover), €128.39 (softcover), €96.29 (Epub, PDF ebook).
- Jacqueline Bolton. The Theatre of Simon Stephens. London: Methuen Drama, 2021, 264 pp., £90.00 (hardback), £28.99 (paperback), £26.09 (PDF ebook).
