Stage: A bleak tale of existential pain

Woman And Scarecrow. By Marina Carr, Peacock Theatre until Oct 31

Birth was the death of him,” Samuel Beckett famously wrote in A Piece Of Monologue. The same could be said for the bed-ridden protagonist of Marina Carr’s latest play, Woman And Scarecrow, for whom living has been merely the act of ‘‘preparing to die’’.

Director Selina Cartmell sets Carr’s strange, dark play in an arctic purgatory, a limbo space between life and ...