1In a study of Virgil and Milton concentrating on the pastoral and consolation, Stephen T. Kelly observes that “[t]wo of man’s [sic] great concerns—death and love—figure prominently in […] pastoral poetry, and it is not accidental that the two themes so often overlap and intertwine” (194). Kelly refers to the “elegiac pastoral” (200): a term that could be extended to aspects of the play discussed here not by means of deduction, but, rather, of thematic focus and writerly sensibilities that ultimately exceed strict genre parameters. As Kelly proposes, “the pastoral tradition is sufficient in itself to provide consolation, working in its familiar ways to incorporate death into the whole scheme of nature, and to make the death of the individual appear as an event which bestows on him [sic], and on all beings, a kind of natural immortality” (200). There is, then, some consolation to be had, at least for spectators, in Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan (1996). The play revolves around a death that has long taken place—that of Portia’s brother, Gabriel, at age fifteen—and another about to happen: that of Portia herself, fifteen years later, as she reaches her thirtieth birthday. The play is significant within the contemporary Irish theatre canon: as Melissa Sihra notes, here the author “journeys deeper into the Midlands interior, continuing a cycle […] where language and the landscape are reflective of the central female characters” (93). Like Ibsen’s Nora (A Doll’s House, 1879), Sihra observes, establishing a naturalist connection, Portia strives for freedom. In Nora’s case this involves a decisive exit from the family home to begin a new life and discover herself. In Portia’s case, however, it entails “connect[ing] to realms of creativity and expression through channels of nature and the outdoors which eventually lead to her death” (Sihra 93).

2Both during the play’s timespan and in her everyday life since Gabriel’s death, Portia grieves the loss that haunts her, remaining inconsolable. The consolation that an audience might extract is that Portia’s story might encourage us towards becoming more empathetic as far as nature, both human and non-human, is concerned. It is a matter of ecological consolation, whereby “ecological” denotes both our interrelationship with our surroundings (human and non-human; animate and inanimate) and feelings of disempowerment and fear as we negotiate present environmental grief. “[L]ove is bound up with the whole problem of death,” Kelly notes, adding that “[t]his love is a more transcendent feeling, the love of nature, in both the subjective and the objective sense: nature’s love for and responsiveness to man [sic], and man’s loving gratitude for this consolation” (195). Portia Coughlan troubles this relationship, revealing intertwinement and tension between human and non-human natures, whereby the former relies on the latter for solace, while also enabling a context of the latter’s degradation and exploitation. Non-human nature, meanwhile, appears far from placid, or welcoming. The transcendence is bound up with the protagonist’s striving to extend beyond her environment, acknowledging, as the only guiding force, the river context that embodies as well as symbolises her one true love: her brother.

3The pastoral, then, appears to guide Carr’s play to some degree in terms of theme and setting, but is, also, ultimately superseded in the playwright’s work, one might deduce for reasons not unlike those that also, as Kelly remarks, cause Virgil and Milton to “eventually desert” it: because “the concept of sympathetic nature is both the great strength and the great weakness of the pastoral” (208). If we proceed from the fact that “[t]he pastoral landscape […] itself become[s] a mourner” (Kelly 204), Carr’s play asks how mourning, performed by human and non-human agents equally, might impact an audience. This could be through empathising with human grief or developing a heightened appreciation of the new complexities in the relationship between human and non-human natures. This was true when Carr’s play premiered, and remains so today, as the health crises of both human and non-human ecosystems are exacerbated, always more intricately interconnected.

Theatre environments and Portia Coughlan

4Carr’s play invites directorial approaches that flesh out its continuing appeal and reveal its significance for our historical moment. For a piece as attuned to its immediate ecosystem, meaning both landscape and relationships, it is pivotal to consider how the climate crisis and its potentially resulting condition of disempowerment, leading to grief for what is already irreparably lost and that which seems near inevitably on a course of extinction or degradation, might inform contemporary productions. Carr’s stage environments, highlighting the intricacies and complexities of female protagonists, specifically invite ecofeminist approaches both greening and gendering the canon. The revival of Portia Coughlan at London’s Almeida Theatre (2023), directed by Carrie Cracknell, exemplifies how Carr’s play can be conceptualised as activist and ecofeminist, drawing attention to issues of declining mental and emotional health while emphasising environmental precarity. This essay discusses Carr’s text vis-à-vis Cracknell’s staging focusing on how Carr’s eponymous character finds herself at the centre of a crisis exacerbated by factors relating to her being embedded in situ, anchored by (be)longing and grief.

5The environmental emphasis is suggested as early as the opening stage directions which inform us that action unfolds in the present “in the Belmont Valley in the Midlands. The stage must incorporate three spaces: the living-room of Portia Coughlan’s house; the bank of the Belmont River; the bar of the High Chaparall” (n. p.). The writer further stresses that the play’s landscape is not only rooted in, but also inhabited by the Midlands, whose distinctive tones extend beyond the written components. Indicatively, regarding accent, Carr notes: “I’ve given a flavour in the text, but the Midland accent is more rebellious than the written word permits” (n. p.). Rebelliousness, the play makes apparent, is a trait of the local character: of the landscape and its people equally.

6Prior to the Almeida’s revival, the play had returned to the Abbey Theatre, directed by Caroline Byrne, designed by Chiara Stephenson, and featuring Denise Gough in the lead (2022). The production, relying on a large-scale, sculptural set with sharp lines that accentuated the depth and height of the stage, presented the three spaces specified, creating a sensation of Portia against the cosmic, and amplifying her grief and inconsolability. As Cathy Leeney notes regarding Carr, it is essential to acknowledge “the effect of landscapes, referring to the natural world, in terms of the shaping of different kinds of character” (716). At the same time, as “there is a movement toward landscape as a central element,” so “[t]he fracturing of stage space between domestic interior, riverbank, and local bar […] signal[s] Carr’s interest in the circulation of inner and outer energies through these spaces” (Leeney 716). Portia’s plight is no lesser than that of tragic heroines, with children mentioned but unseen, a contentious motherhood, a doomed marriage, and the longing for a topos connecting to the only other soul that she felt as her mate—a dead brother. The latter is, moreover, seen in the play as a ghost: both trapped and entrapping Portia in time as, on the day of her birthday and twice the age she and her brother were when Gabriel died, she carries the grief of both the dead and the living, forever hovering between the two worlds. In the recent Abbey show, projections and lighting played an important role towards establishing environments and atmospheres—mental, emotional and physical—maximising stage depth and extending Portia’s plight unto the cosmos.

7The play’s premiere, also at the Abbey—but unlike the revival (programmed on the main stage) at the venue’s smaller Peacock auditorium, directed by Garry Hynes and featuring Derbhle Crotty as Portia—had pursued more realist aesthetics. Shonagh Hill observes that “Kandis Cook’s set and Jim Simmons’ lighting design conveyed the claustrophobic confines of the domestic space” (179). Christina Wald, meanwhile, proposes that “[t]he play’s original production highlighted the permeability or even futility of the border between the two halves of the play’s split setting, Portia’s living room and Gabriel’s realm of the Belmont River, by having a shimmering backcloth, which represented the river, cover the entire back of the stage” (186). Additionally, “[t]his interlocking of the settings accentuated Portia’s parallel but interactive existences in the present and in the past that she shared with her brother” (Wald 186). While I agree, I also argue that the space and time that Portia shares with her brother are not solely the trope of the past, but, rather, constitute a fluid spatiotemporal site.

8The claustrophobic feeling persisted at the Almeida, stemming equally from Portia’s home, where loss, grief and unfulfillment seep through the walls, and the riverbank, where, even in the open horizon, exposed to the elements, Portia is uncontainable—and therefore inconsolable. As Wald argues, “Portia suffers from her double consciousness, which makes her live in both the internally real and the externally real world, that is, in the world were Gabriel is still present and the world in which he is irreparably lost” (187). Hill additionally reflects on the river as “environment of memory” (184), suggesting that such contexts

enable the eruption of the forgotten and unhomely past of Irish women’s confinement, and resistance, to domestic and familial roles; they can accommodate unhomely bodies who dislocate these roles through performance of alternatives. Like Portia’s haunted body, the river enables the resurfacing of repressed cultural memory and the articulation of disruptive female energies which refuse limiting tropes of femininity. (184)

9Portia, then, serves as both herself—including as bearer of her grief—and as a vessel, with a name and surname to counter the anonymity, for unseen women whose own inconsolability regarding gendered systemic suppressions and even abuses may flow from, and bleed into, their interior and exterior environments. As David James observes, “[c]onsolation in works that seem all about inconsolability will invite us to notice how the very language of fiction […] countenances solace in emotionally forbidding climates” (5). Portia’s inconsolability, made visible and palpable in the staging by means of the environmental depiction that allows no margin for bucolic bliss, presenting a dominant, wild, dark landscape, is not communicated as an undesirable condition in either textual or production aesthetics. It is, rather, staged as the only possible condition, whose recognition is the singular meaningful and honest act. Portia herself, in her indignation and resistance to condescension or appeasement, appears reconciled with this.

10Portia’s human ecosystem, other than Gabriel that, seen and heard (as ghost) singing in the duration of performance, haunts not only Portia’s conscience and imaginary, but, also, the play’s entire dramaturgy, includes her husband, parents, paternal grandmother, a small circle of friends, a lover, and the bar manager that momentarily appears to be of sexual interest to Portia, but is eventually rejected. As previously, Portia’s children are referenced but unseen. When Portia dies by drowning on the evening of her birthday, climax is delivered to a day begun and punctuated by heavy drinking, as Portia encounters family, friends and acquaintances, without anyone mitigating her grief, even if some encounters produce temporary comfort. Ultimately, Portia equally resists being celebrated as she does being consoled; the inconsolability becomes her home, and in that she is alone. As Wald notes, “Portia’s gloominess, her fixation on Gabriel, and her lack of love for her husband, that is, her inability to transfer her love and desire to a new object, are symptomatic of her melancholic state” (185). This melancholia stems both from inability (as Gabriel’s death is irreversible) and defiance (since no restitutive measures for this loss are fathomable for Portia) when it comes to finding consolation. As Jürgen Pieters observes in his framing of comfort and consolation, “the desire not to be consoled […] involves the attempt to bear witness to the absolute nature of one’s love” (272). The desolation and devastation that Portia projects unto the landscape, therefore, are projected back unto her; the land and water not only absorb, but also reproduce the feeling, in ripples.

11In the Almeida production, we occasionally see debris along the riverbank, including leftovers of presents given to Portia; but the most intrusive element is the human form, inscribing more pain into the landscape. When Portia is pulled up from the river following her suicide, at one with, and claimed by the element, “[t]hat suspended body, covered as it is in debris from the river, offers no purification; the pity and the fear may be evoked, but like the moss and the frogspawn, they messily remain” (Doyle 50). Moreover, in this staging, the present that Portia receives from her lover (Damus Halion—the same person she has intercourse with when both are teenagers, which she feels betrays her bond with Gabriel, accelerating his demise) is a doll rather than the “clump of violets” specified in Carr’s text (11). Any romantic projections are therefore disrupted: the rag doll suggests Portia’s broken childhood and suspended adulthood. The carrier bag in which it comes, ordinary and far from celebratory, only emphasises the dull reality of quiet resignation: there is no charm; not even an attempt at it. It is this same packaging that will linger on the riverbank after Portia and Damus quarrel, and as the sequence of events leading to Portia’s drowning is accelerated, her own body—rather than that of a doll—ultimately becoming debris by the water.

12When it comes to Portia’s personal and environmental grief, both in the sense of contextual (site; people; relationships) and responsive to the fact that she cannot be at one with the natural element in the full sense that she requires, the image above does not provide catharsis. Portia’s return as living in the final part of the play reminds us that we are in a constant loop, whereby grief, inconsolability, soiling, and debris, will continue. That is, unless we, as individuals and as a community of spectators, can conceptualise a plot fracture such as the one that Carr delivers, and which can be conducive to substantive questions regarding mental, emotional and physical health (the latter both human and non-human, referring to landscape). In “the compulsive revisiting of spaces” (Doyle 53), Portia performs—and reveals to the audience—precisely this loop. Maria Doyle observes that “[t]he world Carr’s heroines exit is one bereft of closure, an angry insulated rural Ireland” (57), in dramatic structures that offer a “disruption of ordered, linear progress” (57). This progress may refer to male capitalist gains (whether by Portia’s father or her husband) involving the active exploitation of that very land that Carr’s women sense a congruence with. That is, “[w]hat we are being asked to look at is not just the dissolution of a life but the fraying of a world confronting its own darkness” (Doyle 57). In the frame of Portia’s all-encompassing grief, Carr invites us to consider “the fraying of a world” in which we partake, and against which we can still intervene (beyond the immediate Irish midlands context). We do not only produce debris, but are also, conceivably, debris ourselves, the Almeida production suggests as Portia’s lifeless body is held up at the moment of recognition.

13Portia Coughlan foregrounds radical inconsolability; to this, the intertwining of human and non-human is central, with (non-human) natural worlds—the land, the river—featuring as contentious sites and forces locating and driving the action. They are both allies and adversaries, interlocked in cosmic interdependence with the human. The Almeida revival was effective in fleshing out these concerns, benefitting from astute casting—especially Alison Oliver as Portia, in what emerged as a ferociously visceral performance of equal strength and vulnerability—as well as from Cracknell’s direction and Eales’s set design, both mindful of the play’s dynamic environments. Cracknell had previously directed the premiere of Ella Hickson’s Oil (Almeida, 2016), an emblematic example of ecologically minded playwriting. Meanwhile, Eales has designed a number of Katie Mitchell’s environmentally driven productions (Fraülein Julie, Schaubühne Berlin, 2010; Glückliche Tage, 2015, and Der Kirschgarten, both Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, 2022). In the production examined here, Cracknell has Portia traverse all three primary locations of the play, her unease evident; only at the riverbank is this transformed to ferocity generated by and matching that of the landscape. Eales’s riverbank, likewise, is not mere background, but imposing presence: dominant and invasive, it crashes against interior spaces, capturing nature’s volume and awesomeness while serving as the bulky visual reminder of Portia’s grief and inconsolability.

14Like Portia herself, the riverbank is open, exposed, abused, marred. Portia experiences abuse and tarnish emotionally and contextually, treated as strange, unpleasant, inadequate. She carries decades of grief for Gabriel and lament for their fraught, intimate, co-dependent bond. Portia also feels pain for family histories of mental, physical and emotional abuse: her own relationship with her parents is strained, as is the one between the couple, and that between Portia’s mother and paternal grandmother. Moreover, there is guilt concerning Portia’s (perhaps imagined) mistreatment of Gabriel in the events leading up to their death (including the sexual act with Damus that compromised their bond and the suicide by drowning pact that she failed to keep at the time). Finally, outliving Gabriel also produces survivor’s guilt for Portia. The riverbank, therefore, is not only the silent witness but also the catalyst of Portia’s inconsolability; an ever-present partner to her grief, as much as a repository of her trauma.

Staging inconsolability

15The occasion of Portia’s birthday is significant because she is unable to celebrate life, belonging to death all along and seeking to disappear into the earth and the non-human elements she feels intimately identified with. Her thirtieth birthday, therefore, feels like a reverse achievement (now having reached double the age she was at the timepoint when she feels she ought to have died). In “The Other Eurydice,” Italo Calvino approaches the events of the myth from the less familiar perspective of Pluto, who also serves as first-person narrator, seeking to restore the truth in “what happened among us—Eurydice and Orpheus and me, Pluto—this story which is just the other way around from the way you tell it” (88). As the narrator continues, “Eurydice was one of us and had never lived on the surface of the Earth before Orpheus ravished her from me with his lying songs” (Calvino 88). The analogy is striking, because of the persistent presence of Gabriel’s song, but also because of how Portia frames her encounter with her husband, who could be seen to represent Orpheus, along with all others populating Portia’s story and who, each in their own way, make a claim for her in a domestic and social ecology that she feels outsider to. The genuine affinity that Portia shares with Gabriel is found in the way she reacts to his song—mesmerised and possessed—whereas the “lying song” of Orpheus (here Portia’s husband Raphael) could be identified with the promise for another life that indeed lures her into his world.

16In the final moments of the play, where paradoxically Portia has not, as we have already seen, died on her birthday (although, in any case, she is dead to the world of the living emotionally), but lives another day and has dinner with her husband, the encounter with Raphael is framed as follows:

PORTIA. I seen you long before you ever seen me, see ya fishin’ one Sunday afternoon and the stillness and sureness that came off of you was a balm to me, and when I asked who ya were and they said that’s Raphael Coughlan, I thought, how can anyone with a name like that be so real, and I says to meself, if Raphael Coughlan notices me I will have a chance to enter the world and stay in it, which has always been the battle for me. And you say you want me to talk about ya the way I talk about Gabriel—I cannot, Raphael, I cannot. And though everyone and everythin’ tells me I have to forget him, I cannot, Raphael, I cannot.

Exit Raphael. Sound of Gabriel’s voice, triumphant. (Carr 61)

17To return to Pieters, here Portia captures what can be described as “the sort of suffering that in itself can neither be solved nor forgotten. The loved one whom we have lost cannot return and neither can we simply divert our attention from their absence” (229). In conveying Portia’s awareness of her profound inconsolability, the above extract also establishes water as the dominant element. Pursuing the Eurydice hypothesis, we might also consider Wald’s suggestion that “[t]he Belmont River is a polyvalent metaphor […]. As watery womb, it is the place of original oneness, secret sexual union, and the dissolution of sex and gender boundaries. As River Styx, it represents the permeable boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead” (194).

18Moreover, as Wald proposes, reflecting on the character’s monological flow (elsewhere in the text), even “Portia’s rhythm of speech imitates the swelling of water and represents the liquid world in which no boundaries between the siblings existed” (189). Portia’s attraction to Raphael appears to stem precisely from his calm, mindful interaction with the river, which in turn furnishes a possibility of retaining that which is most important—the contact with the water—while being brought into a new stage in her life, in which she may “enter the world and stay in it”—that which she has not previously been able to achieve (Carr 61). Here, one might detect both hope and desolation, but also an element of (self-)deceit in how Portia appears to attempt to console herself with that which is momentarily attractive but is not, in substance, desirable, and, therefore, only has the capacity of delivering ephemeral comfort. As Wald notes, framing the bond with Gabriel as she does, “Portia projects her melancholic state back into the past and belatedly installs it as an irrecoverable origin” (189). Hence, she remains inconsolable, and the play delivers no neat resolution in either form or content. The fact that Portia’s marriage to Raphael—the experience of parenting their three children included—proves to be unfulfilling and unsatisfactory, underlines the point.

19Portia, then, joins Raphael in the world of the living, like another Eurydice—this, from the perspective of Pluto addressing Orpheus in Calvino’s essay is the result of “trickery” that delivers her to that “desolate exterior” (89). Still, Portia is always destined to be returned to the dark waters she comes from, first experienced in the mother’s womb, and later underscoring her entire life, which she continues to share with Gabriel, irrespective of whether he is alive or dead. To understand the bond and the longing, Calvino’s framing is helpful: “It was a terrestrial life that we sought––one of the earth and in the earth––not the kind sprouting from the surface that you see fit to call terrestrial life even though it’s only a mold spreading its spots […],” he writes (90). Eales’s set, depicting this very mold on the riverbank, establishes visually Portia’s inconsolability at being separate from that which she truly longs for, and which is not the surface of everyday, domestic life: the darkness and deepness of the earth, which she can ultimately approximate by submerging herself in water. Her suicide by drowning achieves the combined effect of surrendering her to the element and the world she longs for, as well as to her dead brother. As Wald remarks, “Gabriel and the lost union with him becomes a place of fulfilment, a utopia that differs from the rigid (gender) boundaries of her environment” (192).

20Calvino’s Pluto discusses the song of Orpheus (the equivalent in Carr’s play would be the quietly alluring demeanour of Raphael in his interaction with an element (water) precious to Portia that appears meaningful to him too, but in fact is merely treated in a utilitarian way), contrasting it with the aural harmonies in the experience that he and Eurydice enjoyed as at one with the world and its elements. Pluto mentions the “kingdom of silence and music,” where, in “diversity and wholeness,” creatures like them would live; there, “all the profound voices of the elements would harmonize” (Calvino 90). The “Sound of Gabriel’s voice, triumphant,” which closes the play and performance, delivers this effect. At one with the element, Gabriel, depicted singing while standing on the riverbank, body and voice extending out and upwards and inhabiting the entire structure of the play, has solidified the claim on Portia. As Calvino writes, the irreconcilables, in that world, reconcile: silence and music co-exist to give Portia her one and only true relief, returning her to a world of implicit understanding that does not require verbal communication (we are given clues that such had always been Portia and Gabriel’s bond), and whose richness is captured in the extraordinary song of Gabriel. Meaningfully, after Gabriel has died, the haunting song is audible only to Portia (and the audience). In Portia’s mind, music and silence blend to remind her of that, which she lost, and which she longs for: the inner and intimate world, from the mother’s womb to the river—namely, the environments which she shared with Gabriel.

21“One’s mother’s body is the biosphere,” writes Timothy Morton in Dark Ecology (119). The volume also makes reference to Morton’s “hyperobject,” widely used in interdisciplinary environmental discourses and defined as “massively distributed entities that can be thought and computed, but not directly touched or seen” (“Poisoned Ground” 37). Morton further adds: “The ecological crisis is best thought as the time of hyperobjects. […] Because this is the moment at which massive nonhuman, nonsentient entities make decisive contact with humans, ending various human concepts such as ‘world,’ ‘horizon,’ ‘Nature’ and even ‘environment’” (“Poisoned Ground” 39). Here, Morton also reflects on the kind of artistic output that is expressive of, responsive to, and suitable for this era. If a play is an entity unto itself, beyond its original 1990s context (at which time environmental discourses were already, nonetheless, active), staged in 2023, not least with a creative team and aesthetic such as that discussed earlier and in the receiving spectatorial context of the climate crisis, Portia Coughlan must necessarily be thought of as a play attuned to the climate question. This by extension includes environmental degradation and personal grief as not only intersecting with, but being always already environmental.

22As Morton notes, “[t]he ecological era we find ourselves in––whether we like it or not and whether we recognize it or not––makes necessary a searching revaluation of philosophy, politics, and art” (Dark Ecology 159). Therein lies grief’s devastating hyperobject potential, interlocked with the fact that Portia becomes increasingly unable to distinguish between body and site, or to set any kind of boundary—precisely because of the dissolution of distinct entities and concepts much in the way that Morton describes. “We realize, after we discover hyperobjects, that non-human entities exist that are incomparably vaster and more powerful than us, and that our reality is caught in them […] writing us into their histories,” writes Morton (“Poisoned Ground” 44). The context that Portia both is embedded in and wrestles with, the hypercombined pain as transposed unto the landscape and vice versa, is an example of this. Portia is, thus, absorbed into the history of a land that sites her, rather than her having control over the narrative where she comes to be sited. She is, consequently, written in, rather than writing her story. In that sense, her suicide appears less as a tragedy and more as an acknowledgement—returning to Calvino’s Eurydice—of the embeddedness in an ongoing plot, which overpowers and overwhelms her, and which she makes no attempt to resist, because surrendering, to her, is not defeat. It is, rather, acknowledgement of the cosmic condition, in which her crisis is only resolvable in a singular way.

23For Portia, the hyperobject of grief is itself triggered by another hyperobject, namely environmental dis-ease. Portia, that is, feels ill at ease within her social and domestic environment, at the same time as she feels unfailingly drawn to the river. As Sihra notes, Portia’s complex environment “encompasses the dual world of factories, bank books and dirty dishes with innate energies of pagan belief, ghosts and storytelling” (100). Negotiating this co-existing reality that is multiple, Portia experiences inconsolability as a heavy and physical weight observable in her comportment during the performance, with Carr’s protagonist forever in motion and permanently displaced, except in the moments when she is at the riverbank. This is best understood as constantly attempting to grapple with a force so obliterating and unrelenting that it is difficult to imagine a term more suitable for it than Morton’s. We hear Portia defend the land around the river, asserting her right to it (via family ownership); moreover, as the site of her brother’s drowning, the river endows Portia with even stronger entitlement.

24To have been thrust unto the physical realm by being born, is, to Portia, to have been displaced from the beginning: in the water, she seeks the liquidity of the womb—that biosphere that at first connected her to Gabriel, the site in which they were closest. As she confesses to Raphael:

Times I close me eyes and I feel a rush of water around me and above we hear the thumpin’ of me mother’s heart, and we’re a-twined […], and we don’t know which of us is the other and we don’t want to, and the water swells around our ears, and all the world is Portia and Gabriel packed for ever in a tight hot womb, where there’s no breathin’, no thinkin’, no seein’ only darkness and heart drums and touch […]. (60)

25As Doyle argues, “the immersion in water can also be read symbolically as a union with a feminine element” (44). Or, as Wald observes, “the suicide is an attempt to restore Portia’s blissful prenatal, embryonic fusion with Gabriel in that she attempts to recreate their former union in the watery womb when she follows Gabriel into the Belmont River” (193). Such, then, is Portia’s biosphere: the liquid is linked to the maternal; except, Portia’s difficult relationship with her mother means that she experiences a greater congruence with that, which has served as the substitute of that feeling of envelopment and closeness—the river—than with the source environment itself (her mother’s body). Failing to negotiate the hyperobject of loss and grief, Portia, therefore, chooses suicide as the only way of being connected to the non-human, which for her signifies a return to the liquid state, and to her brother. Whereas some forms of consolation might inherently imply feeling in unison with fellow humans, this is a scenario that was never going to function in counteracting Portia’s grief. From her disharmonious childhood, where in constant familial strife the only ally was Gabriel, to her fraught transition to an adulthood that has failed to anchor her in the everyday realm, Portia’s pain is exacerbated rather than soothed by those imagining themselves as her nearest. On the contrary, in the abandonment of her attempt to meet the requirements of the roles projected unto her (daughter, wife, mother) and in the return to the only state she has ever felt at home in (sister), Portia becomes at one with the landscape, to which she finally submits herself. Inconsolable in life, then, Portia can, perhaps, be consoled in death.

26It has been argued that Portia Coughlan exposes the “conflict between manmade/domestic and natural spaces” (Price 37), while also revealing “the spectral qualities” of landscapes and suggesting “a symbiotic relationship between the land and the characters who inhabit those worlds” (Price 41). While I agree with the second, I take a different approach to the dynamic between human-made and non-human-made spaces, aligning my argumentation to that of Leeney, who treats the experience of these spaces, but also their eco-systemic impact on Carr’s characters, as always already intertwined. This essay suggests that it is the impact of this kind of closed circuits that Carr seeks to reveal and acknowledge, and, in so doing, through the experiential interaction of inconsolability and consolation, to invite the spectator to consider how, in recognising this mutual impact, positive change might be accomplished.

27“[W]hat happens to an audience’s experience of the theatrical event when the central […] sign of the drama, the body of the hero, ‘dies’ in the middle of the play?” asks Doyle reflecting on Portia Coughlan (41). The question is doubly significant. Firstly, because of how the structure of the play is already haunted by a dead character before we come to experience the events leading to, or the aftermath of the protagonist’s death; therefore, the question comes with implications extending beyond Portia. Secondly, because Portia’s body—and, in the case of Cracknell’s production, by extension that of Oliver (or the other way around)—both inhabits and is inhabited by those intertwining human- and non-human-made landscapes, therefore inscribing, as well as having inscribed upon them, a presence that, in combining the human and non-human element, endures long after the (fictional) human body has (fictionally) perished. As such, the process of grief and consolation is troubled further. That is, as spectators we cannot grieve a human body that has not died, because it is forever presenced by landscape; and, in any case, we could not have done so because that very human body appears to return after its own death, within the play’s fictional reality rather than as an illusion, appearing, as is the case with Portia, never to have perished at all.

28The significance of such a dramaturgical gesture might, today, also be interpreted as an attempt at breaking the cycle of the anthropocentric, and of how we come to think of character and subject continuity, displacing the human protagonist while accentuating the significance of the non-human environment, and, therefore, inviting spectators to consider this as the key event. Rather than the consolation of Portia, that is, it is the consolation of the landscape that we ought to be reflecting on, given that the traditional repository of sympathy—the human—has shown itself as an unreliable, unstable, and thoroughly mutable agent. As Wald notes, “Portia’s suicide, which attempts an impracticable repetition, epitomises her general melancholic suffering, which derives from the impossibility of repeating the past” (194). For Portia, the wound lies in that the past cannot be recreated; for the spectators, the occasion for a reconsideration lies in the fact that the future can; the cycle of abuse and extraction, that is, could actually be disrupted. As Pieters observes, “[t]exts that aim to console […] need to have a forceful and inescapable appeal, but not an intrusive one. Their power of address is not coercive but generous. Their appeal is that of an open invitation to interpret, and to interpret as freely as one can” (268). It is Carr’s unconventional form in what might otherwise be described as a play that follows naturalist principles, and her disruption of linearity and time that delivers this, heightening both the artistic and the pedagogical accomplishment of the play. There is a form of non-coercive instruction in depicting what damage to people and landscapes, and their interconnectedness, can accomplish—and therefore how it might be averted. Or, as Pieters might put this, “comfort comes with a form of learning, with an insight that is new and that we may well never have arrived at without […] these texts” (256).

29Leeney pursues the idea of “theatre as landscape” in Carr’s oeuvre, noting: “For Carr, the representation of existence beyond death as an ending works to intensify life in all its mortality and to extend its meaning” (705). I agree with this contention and propose that when we consider Portia Coughlan and the specific production, the implication is twofold: firstly, that Carr’s dramaturgy and Cracknell’s staging highlight the transience of the human, as well as of the non-human: weary, exposed, rugged, threatened. Secondly, that in allowing us to glimpse at life after death Carr elicits a tacit dialogue with the audience, whereby the lead character’s inconsolability motivates us not to merely acknowledge and accept that death marks the end of the journey, but to revisit the path that produces it, as well as its aftermath (both climactic, as in Portia’s funeral, and anti-climactic, as in the fact that the final part of the play shows us Portia alive). This highlights both a certain evitability and an inevitability regarding the course of events, allowing us to appreciate the extent and effect of Portia’s inconsolability. Moreover, we are encouraged to reconsider the broader implications through Portia’s story as reminder of the circle of life, where we take that life to be both human and non-human. In other words, via this kind of plot device, the play sets up its interventionist potential in terms of how we might approach erosions of the human and non-human alike, considering alternative actions and outcomes in terms of preserving either, or, indeed, both.

30That the play’s lead character is a woman is of course significant, not least for asserting the enduring ecofeminist symbolic capital of the play. As Leeney observes:

Carr’s continuing focus on women in her plays creates the possibility of a renewal of the symbolic power of the woman figure onstage, growing out of this new context. […] There is a link between themes surrounding deaths, endings, and continuings and […Carr’s] intricate dramaturgies of narrative and action; these associations in turn influence her ideas of character and landscape in theatre. (706)

31The mention of how a new kind of heroine “grows” from such a dramaturgical approach is striking, underlining how new ecologies of playwriting, which sprout out of the need to probe afresh the relationship between non-human and human ecologies, can take root. The cyclical life of nature appears to be mirrored in the (paradoxically) cyclical life of a person, for example, which in text and performance follows a life-death-life course. All the while, nothing of this process operates didactically: neither nature nor heroine are set up as pure, noble, or innocent. As Leeney adds: “Landscape in contemporary theatrical representation is a site of contest between human values and structures (social, psychological, architectural), and nature’s implacable difference, the amoral chemistry of Gaia” (715).

32It is important to note the predicate that Leeney chooses: “amoral” could also be applied to Portia, who is staged as both the daughter and the preserver of the landscape she originates from—attuned to its pain, and drawing her only source of solace in her interactions with it. Portia, like the landscape, and vice versa, is not depicted as either moral or immoral: such binaries, the play suggests, are irrelevant. We begin, rather, from a point of radical honesty and openness in terms of how the individual’s relationship to themselves and their environment could be laid in the open, re-evaluated. In her continuous return to the riverbank, Portia is, ultimately, on a pilgrimage: the revelation of truth will produce, if not comfort, at least an acknowledgement of a tangled, difficult past, where nature has been stretched and abused. This stems both from incestuous human relationships (as Sihra mentions “the land-locked Belmont Valley is a metaphor for inbreeding where the theme of incest […] signifies self-destructive repetition” [109]), and the exploitation, monetisation and exhaustion of the land. More than consoling herself, then, Portia is on the mission of restoring facts and balances.

33As Leeney concludes, the playwright “creates stage worlds across the boundaries between persons and species, and between the hemispheres of life and death. The landscape represents a scene of hauntings, of memory, love, failure, transcendence” (718-719). Or, as Sihra notes, “Portia’s connection with the old ways and the natural world is an act of self-definition which transcends the limitations of her everyday life” (102). While the latter might be taken to imply a form of consolation, this, perhaps, is not even the most desirable outcome. Consolation, that is, could also be achieved not by relief, but by exposure: by revealing the vanity of upholding a pretence of care and community; or by accepting and even performing failure towards overcoming it. It does not, therefore, need to be a positive term, but it can still be one that leads to liberation, if not necessarily redemption. Portia’s entire course in the play, her uncanny return, as well as her final monologue, serve as reminders of this.

34As this essay has discussed, Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan offers a reflection on archaeologies of grief: personal and collective histories of devastation written into the landscape, which serves as host for Portia’s lament and as monument and repository of her love for Gabriel. Portia melds with her surroundings, eventually becoming one with her environment, not only mentally and emotionally, but also physically, as the result of her suicide. The mass that Eales’s design placed on the Almeida stage allowed, depending on Guy Hoare’s lighting design, spectators to imagine it as rubble, or as rocks. The variation alluded not only to the immovability, but also the burden of Portia’s pain. Meanwhile, taken literally as a riverbank the setting remained visible throughout performance, a poignant reminder of the lives lost, and of the endurance of the land and water vis-à-vis human transience. As Sihra observes, “[t]he rural Midlands landscape pulsates within Portia Coughlan as a deeply felt emotional terrain” (99). As this essay has also proposed, the land is, indeed, an equal protagonist to the titular character with profound symbiosis shaping their common fate. Moreover, “[a]s a free-flowing energy the river is a channel of female resistance to closed off boundaries of patriarchy […]. Portia’s sense of self is drowning under the surveillance of […men] and her only feeling of renewal can be felt in the rush of the river” (Sihra 109). Through the play’s depiction of this bond, and the raising of awareness on health concerns, the spectator is not to be painlessly consoled that Portia meets a neat ending when she dies by suicide in the river. As Pieters puts this, “the comfort in question is not of the variety that offers easy reassurance and says that all will be well in the end” (251). Spectators are encouraged, rather, to ask how some consolation is to be found in non-human ecosystems when human ones fail to provide it. As a further dimension, audiences could consider how such non-human agents might be not merely acknowledged, but also preserved in the context of their significance, towards a more meaningful connection with, rather than exploitation by, human agents.