The Lonesome West

ADC, 18^th – 22^nd, 7.45pm, £6 – £10

Directed by Charlie Risius

[rating:3/5]

Dark matter is impossible to see or record, but we all know it’s there because the mass-to-light ratio of galaxies is all squiffy, and from the spin of Martin McDonagh’s galaxies we can tell that there must be dark matter in The Lonesome West.

The final part of McDonagh’s Connemara trilogy gives us two psychopathic brothers: one obsessed with religious icons and a stove, the other with vol-au-vents. There’s a maudlin priest, and a sexually precocious ‘Girleen’. There’s drinking, murder, and suicide. It’s definitely feckin’ dark.

That’s not to say there isn’t your average (visible) light matter to react with. McDonagh is a first class jokesmith who can make his funnies as surreal or traditional as he chooses. Last night’s performance dealt with both kinds very well, through some excellent timing and physicality. Everyone was laughing almost all the time.

In his director’s notes, Charlie Risius promised not to overdo the tragedy or the comedy of the play: it was going to be naturalistic. The discomforting quality of McDonagh’s work comes largely from a juxtaposition of the horrifying and the everyday, so a naturalistic presentation, playing the comfortable against the uncanny, would have been an effective and potentially devastating way of realising the play’s dualities. But Risius had a problem in realising his intentions – three of the four cast members are not native Irish, and, of course, they all had to do the accent.

Michael Campbell (Coleman)’s was good. He’s the Irish one. Genevieve Gaunt, the wholesomest teen ‘Girleen’, delivered some flawlessly lilted lines, but there were fleeting moments of something alien. Arthur Kendrick (Father Welsh) and Jack Hudson (Valene) were the same. All accomplished, certainly, but there were occasional smudges that gave the game away.

Unfortunately there’s something inherently amusing about imitating the Irish voice; every utterance feels like becoming a Father Ted funny-line, even if it’s something that should prick the hairs and weaken the stomach. This was always going to be a problem with the production: the script tightropes impossibly between hilarity and evil, and that balance is already difficult to utilise without the sense that Mrs Doyle might fall through the door at any moment and offer you some cocaine.

The thing is, during the show I was led to believe that Charlie Risius knew this all along. It felt like the dark matter was deemed too difficult to reveal. It was always the jokes that burned brightest. The absurd, shocking moments – when Father Welsh plunges his hands into boiling plastic for example – just didn’t seem to get the same attention as the interactions that were always going to make the audience laugh. Whilst the blocking was generally ‘naturalistic’ and deft, some scenes and comic exchanges were definitely stylised. The tragicomic climax of the play, in which the mad brothers admit their past atrocities (escalating from stealing toys to mutilating animals), played like a sketch, the balance between tragedy and farce frequently tipping too far towards the latter. The absurd violence became an uncomplicated joke; there was little subtlety in the expression, no violent interaction between comic matter and its volatile opposite.

The depiction of Girleen also tipped the scales. As excellent as it was to see Genevieve Gaunt in those outfits, she became a cliché of immature, damaged sexuality, her panty hinting and leg splaying in the first half was more school-girl porno than the dark, twisting plexus of insecurity that might have been there, hiding amongst the light.

Nonetheless, you should still go and see it. Martin McDonagh is a genius, and not everyone wants darkness to be visible. There’s no doubt that it’s a laugh-a-minute show. It is also an admirably ambitious project, and it’s wonderful to see a play like this as an ADC mainshow. The actors are obviously talented; the set is excellent; the costumes get the uncomfortable balance between the homely and the strange just right. The Lonesome West is a bright, burning play, but despite my hopes, the existence of its dark matter is still waiting to be proved.