In her new play, Ariel, Marina Carr returns again to drama's Greek roots, by way of the midlands dialect and modern Irish public life, reports Ian Kilroy.

Over halfway through Marina Carr's new play, Ariel, one of the characters, Boniface, observes, in the writer's midlands dialect, that "ya don't have to make anhin up . . . Everythin ya can possibly imagine has happened already". In more ways than one, Boniface aptly describes the world of his author's play. This is a place we have been before, a place in some way familiar.

In Ariel, not only does Carr conjure up again - as she did in her previous works, Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats - her dark, imagined locus of bogs and midlands lakes, but she brings us into a world that frighteningly mirrors our own.

The mirror she holds up may distort and magnify the tragic in life, but it is recognisable nonetheless as the hidden private world of incest and matricide and domestic murder that has become commonplace in the public world of news headlines. As in this country over the last decade, Carr's theatre is a world of hidden horrors revealed, and acknowledged as far from exceptional.

In terms of dramatic history, Ariel is again a place we have been before. Carr's work is a return to the mythic roots of drama, to Aeschylus and Euripides. In The Oresteia, Agamemnon has sacrificed his virgin daughter, Iphigenia, and is murdered on his return from the Trojan War by his wife, Clytemnestra. In turn, Clytemnestra is murdered by her daughter, Electra, and Electra's brother, Orestes, in retribution for the death of their father. In a nutshell, this is the world of Ariel. As Carr acknowledges, the mythic substructure of Greek drama is knowingly employed.

"Ariel is based loosely on The Oresteia," she says. "The plot is pretty faithful to Iphigenia, Agamemnon and Electra. I suppose I use myth to add another layer - but it's not something that I consciously do. If it erupts out of the stuff, then well and good. I'm aware that the plot is linked, but then I forget about that and try and write the play."

Ariel is the seventh play that Carr, not yet 40, will stand over. There were two others [The Deer's Surrender and This Love Thing], but she prefers not to talk about them. Indeed, in her gentle, soft-spoken rural accent - somewhere between her native Co Offaly and the west - she prefers not to speak to journalists at all, openly admitting that, like the famed Friel, she is uncomfortable doing interviews.

With her personal life off-limits to questions, all that there remains to discuss is the work. But even on this subject there is a reluctance to talk - not a rude reluctance, but a soft vulnerability that must be respected. As a consequence, questions must be phrased and rephrased to solicit an answer, carefully couched in a language that provokes her to take up what is under discussion - her use of dialect, for example.

"The early plays were absurdist; they were Standard English. The dialect came in with Portia Coughlan," she says. "It's an element of the way that people in the midlands speak . . . it's a created world we're finally talking about. It is inspired, certainly, by where I grew up."

That language then, like Synge's, is ultimately an imagined language, written for the stage. It came to Carr during the writing of Portia Coughlan, which had been commissioned by the National Maternity Hospital and which premièred at the Peacock.

So the phases in this young writing life are, first, the Beckett-inspired Ullaloo and Low in the Dark, followed by a change to writing phonetically, in a heightened midlands dialect. This second phase brings Carr up to - and includes - Ariel, but it is, she says, coming to an end.

"This is the last play for a long time that I'll write in this idiom," she says. "I'm going back to Standard English after this. Dialect has taken me somewhere else, but . . . I can't wait to go back to English, I can't wait to obey those rules."

For the meantime, however, we remain in Carr's imagined midlands. Politician Fermoy Fitzgerald makes a kind of Faustian pact in pursuit of a seat in Dáil Éireann and, ultimately, the far, bright goal of the office of taoiseach. The price of his sacrifice will be dear and will set in motion - in Greek tragic mode - a number of deaths. As a boy, Fitzgerald had a hand in his own mother's murder. In Ariel, as in other Carr works, the sins of the past continue to haunt the future. There is a blot carried forth that continues to mark succeeding generations.

The world of Ariel is a world of hidden evils and dark supernatural powers. Ghosts walk these boards, and the sphere of the familiar in Irish life - inhabited by recognisable TDs and current concerns - co-habit on the stage with the dark magic of blood sacrifices and the talking dead. In short, the mythic and the actual are fused in the work.

But this is not in the Joycean way, whereby Bloom becomes a likeable and betimes comic anti-hero, in counterpoint to his Odyssean adventures, but in a way that condemns Ariel to the literal fate of her own parallel Greek character, that of Iphigenia.

Whether the contemporary midlands world of Fermoy Fitzgerald and his family can endure the full weight of myth on their shoulders will be seen in director Conall Morrison's forthcoming production.

What these characters must endure, however, is the brooding violence and unhappy familial relationships that we have come to associate with Carr's recent work: the incest and rape of On Raftery's Hill, the death of Hester in By the Bog of Cats and Portia's suicide in Portia Coughlan. In Ariel, there is murder in the past and three family killings in the play's present - one victim stabbed in the throat - and yet Carr says that her plays are essentially neither bleak nor violent.

"I don't have much interest in darkness; if that's what comes out, that's what comes out," she says. "I'm not interested in violence . . . so where does that leave us?"

When I suggest that the plays' content suggests otherwise, she responds: "Well, so be it . . . you write what you have to write, you don't necessarily have to understand what you're writing about. Do you know?"

Where, indeed, does that leave us? Carr is intent on leaving interpretation to others. "That's not my business, that's not what I'm up to, that's up to other people," she says. "I just want to tell a story."

While she will claim her creations in the calm space of reflection after the act of writing, she will not engage in critical interpretation of them; she will barely, indeed, engage in any conversation about them.

She is intent, however, on stressing that there is no rich ground to be explored in her own life for those seeking interpretation. "The autobiographical argument in art, I just think it's so boring - looking for the dysfunction in the writer to explain the work," she says.

She appears to subscribe to T.S. Eliot's opinion that the personality of the artist should be extinct in the work he or she creates; although she does say that "of course there has to be a link . . . maybe you make yourself extinct as you go along".

Her view that the artist's life should leave no trace in the finished work is consistent with her view on herself as that all-too-rare person in the Irish theatre: a woman writer. For Carr, her sex - or the sex of any writer - is largely unimportant.

"I don't think it matters a damn if the voice is male or female; it's what the voice is saying," she says. "The work doesn't care if it was a man or woman that wrote it; did you have 10 children screaming in the kitchen or a cork-lined study to work in."

For Carr, the historical and material conditions of production are less important than what used to be called inspiration. "The greatest type of writing for me is when it writes itself," she says.

When I ask where it comes from, she says "at its best, I think you're talking about the gods".

"The gods" - this is language the Greeks would be at home with. Theirs was a universe where the boundary between ethereal heaven and the dirty, earthly world of human politics was still open. But is our belief the same, or have the gods abdicated? Can a contemporary midlands politician have equal access, in a literal sense, to his gods?

In Ariel, Fermoy appears to have actual contact with the other world. That, and his Napoleonic complex, make him seem partly like a certain living, breathing ex-politician, one whose name was at the heart of the controversy over Sebastian Barry's portrayal of him in Hinterland.

Carr rejects any concern with actual political life. This, she says, is not another Hinterland. "I know nothing about politics, I've no interest in politics. I am not commenting on the state of politics in Ireland," she says.

"For me, it was very simple. I wanted the payback for what this man was going to do to be huge. I suppose the most powerful job in this country is to be leader of this country - that's the way I saw it. It was as simple as that,then all the rest followed."

What has followed is another tragedy from the writer who says she "enjoys writing tragedies". A modern-day Oresteia, an Athens in Offaly from the Aeschylus of the Abbey. The quiet oracle has again spoken.

• Ariel by Marina Carr opens at the Abbey on Wednesday, October 2nd at 8 p.m., with previews from Friday, September 27th. To book, tel: 01-8787222.