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The Cordelia Dream
Haunted by her dream of Cordelia and Lear, a woman confronts an elderly man, her lifelong antagonist and rival. During their passionate altercation he dismisses her success as a composer and demands she make the ultimate for him to flourish she, his protegee, must be silent. Five years later, she returns for a final and devastating encounter. Marina Carr's "The Cordelia Dream" premiered in December 2008 at Wilton's Music Hall, London, in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
64 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
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About the author
Marina Carr
43 books32 followersMarina Carr was brought up in County Offaly. A graduate of University College Dublin, she has written extensively for the theatre. She has taught at Villanova, Princeton, and currently teaches in the School of English, Dublin City University. Awards include the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Macaulay Fellowship, the E. M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Wyndham Campbell Prize. She lives in Dublin with her husband and four children.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 17, 2022
This is one of those lovely Marina Carr plays where there feels like there's so much depth and I wish I could see all of it. There's a lot going on, and I definitely have some thoughts about what the play is saying, but I feel like there are so many more layers than appeared to me at first.
The play is about a man and a woman, father and daughter, who are both composers of classical music. They have a toxic relationship because the father is egotistical and has jealously guarded his perceived genius, whereas the daughter has blamed her mental anguish on her father's actions and his attempts to silence her musical voice. They are absolutely vicious to one another, but strangely enough they also love one another through their hate. The father tries to silence his daughter out of the belief that if she is silenced his gift will return--and she eventually falls silent to try and let him have that gift back. In the second act, her ghost returns after her suicide, to lead him into his death and give him the briefest of glimpses at the musical transcendence he dreams of. In this sense, it is very much like the Lear-Cordelia relationship in Shakespeare, because Lear silences and essentially tries to destroy his daughter because she refuses to submit to him absolutely, and yet she returns at the end of the play to sacrifice herself for him.
https://youtu.be/tiMOz3tXlvs
The play is about a man and a woman, father and daughter, who are both composers of classical music. They have a toxic relationship because the father is egotistical and has jealously guarded his perceived genius, whereas the daughter has blamed her mental anguish on her father's actions and his attempts to silence her musical voice. They are absolutely vicious to one another, but strangely enough they also love one another through their hate. The father tries to silence his daughter out of the belief that if she is silenced his gift will return--and she eventually falls silent to try and let him have that gift back. In the second act, her ghost returns after her suicide, to lead him into his death and give him the briefest of glimpses at the musical transcendence he dreams of. In this sense, it is very much like the Lear-Cordelia relationship in Shakespeare, because Lear silences and essentially tries to destroy his daughter because she refuses to submit to him absolutely, and yet she returns at the end of the play to sacrifice herself for him.
https://youtu.be/tiMOz3tXlvs
Displaying 1 of 1 review