Dr Tanya Dean introduces Marina Carr's long-awaited two-part theatrical event The Boy, inspired by Greek tragedies Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, which premieres at the Abbey Theatre this month as part of the 2025 Dublin Theatre Festival.
When The Boy was first announced for the Abbey Theatre's 2020 season, it promised to be a major event: the world premiere of Marina Carr’s epic cycle of plays.
Then, of course, the world stopped. COVID-19 closed theatre doors.
What should have been a moment of artistic celebration dissolved into that strange, suspended time of uncertainty and fear.
Watch: Writer Marina Carr and director Caitríona McLaughlin on The Boy
Director Caitríona McLaughlin recalls the impact: "When I was offered the opportunity to direct this play, I couldn't believe my luck, that I was going to get the opportunity to do this. And I will never forget the feeling of finding out it wasn’t going to happen."
Yet the project refused to disappear. As Carr recalls, "We’ve been working on it every year since. It became talismanic in a way." The delay brought time to wrestle with ideas, draft and redraft, and to mine the contradictions of its ancient sources. In hindsight, that enforced pause may have been a gift.
An Ancient Curse, Retold
The Boy takes its bearings from multiple sources, including Sophocles’ Theban plays – the tales of Oedipus and his accursed line that have haunted Western imagination for over two millennia. Laius, king of Thebes, is warned his son will grow up to kill him. In trying to escape the prophecy, Laius ensures its fulfilment. The boy grows to be Oedipus, who unknowingly kills his father, marries his mother Jocasta, and brings a plague upon Thebes. Even after Oedipus blinds himself and dies in exile, the curse lingers. His daughter Antigone defies the state by burying her brother, and in turn she too is destroyed.
These are stories of destiny, pride, and punishment, where the gods exact vengeance regardless of human cost. They have been retold by countless voices – from Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, to our own Yeats and Heaney.
To stage The Boy in 2025 is to place it against the backdrop of our own recent history.
But The Boy is not a mere retelling of old myths; these plays challenge their source material, pull on its myriad (often contradictory) threads, and transform it into something daringly new. As Carr puts it: "What we’re trying to do is marry the ancient with the contemporary. We’ve been able to explore how the different versions of the myths contradict each other, and then use that to play around with who owns what part of the story, see who contradicts who. I don't want people to be turned off by thinking, 'it's based on a Greek myth, it's going to be obscure or highfalutin.’ It's not going to be that – it's a story. It's essentially a story about a family over 3 generations." "A family", McLaughlin adds, "who discover horrendous things about themselves."
Divine Will and Mortal Law
In Carr’s version, gods and monsters walk among humans. The Sphinx, the Shee, the Moon, the Godwoman – these figures are not relics of superstition in The Boy but real presences that mould human lives; sometimes through vengeance, sometimes through indifference. For McLaughlin, this raises pressing questions: "Contemporary generations have a less close relationship to the idea of God than our parents and grandparents did. Here, the myth is explored through the presence and absence of gods. What is Man’s law versus God’s law—and which one is right, and right for whom?"
Echoes in the Present
To stage The Boy in 2025 is to place it against the backdrop of our own recent history. We too have endured the shadow of a plague. We too live with the revelations of abuse and betrayal carried out for "the good of the state". Carr's re-imagining of these stories is not about distant Greeks alone. It is about us.
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Listen: The cast of The Boy talk to RTÉ Arena
Epic in scale, these plays reach back thousands of years and forward into the present moment. They speak of cycles of violence and silence, of reckoning with truths too long buried, and of the uneasy recognition of guilt where ignorance and complicity blur.
Jocasta, in Carr's words, voices a sentiment that could as easily belong to today’s Ireland as to ancient Thebes:
Even still I wake astonished it wasn’t just some savage dream.
That it happened.
That this city allowed it to happen.
That I allowed it to happen.
We can never allow this to happen again.
Five years later than planned, The Boy takes its place on the Abbey stage. It comes to us both as ancient myth and modern mirror; a reminder that stories survive not because they stay the same, but because they keep finding new ways to speak to who we are, and who we might yet be.
Dr Tanya Dean is a Lecturer in Drama at TU Dublin and Conservatoire Script Associate, Literary and New Work Department, at the Abbey Theatre.
The Boy is at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin until 1 November 2025 - find out more here
