'The size a the nigh in thah man is past measurin.'

Fermoy Fitzgerald, a politician from the Irish midlands, is a man capable of anything. He has the dreams of a conqueror. In Ariel Marina Carr attends to events surrounding his daughter's sixteenth birthday and dissects the soul of a man in thrall to powerful forces. By scratching the scars of a family's ancient skirmishes she unfolds the story of Cuura Lake.

While the play embraces age-old themes -- power and its price, fate, the importance of remembering and of forgetting — it is also the author's most contemporary work. Gorgeously cadenced, elaborately wrought, it is a score for the grand scale of her dreadful imaginings.

Marina Carr is our laureate of destructive passions. Ariel signals a leap in the trajectory of this prodigiously talented writer.