Gruesome, not lonesome

Martin McDonagh's play is rich in comedy and Tarantino-like violence, as funny as it is repulsive – but it's still thin drama, writes Colin Murphy of The Lonesome West

Nine years since Martin McDonagh first took Galway, then London, then Dublin by storm, a new production of the third play in his scabrous Leenane Trilogy provides a good an opportunity to see whether all the fuss was worth it.

The Lonesome West is not a very good play. It is slight and overlong, a comic sketch stretched to cover two hours. Yet 50 or 100 years from now, it will be dusted down (or downloaded) and quoted in knowledgable cultural studies the way Synge is today.

Historians will marvel at how McDonagh, without even the benefit of being reared in Ireland (he is London-born and reared, of Galway parents) so closely captured, and satirised, the crises gripping 1990s rural Ireland in these barbaric comedies. This is a country where suicide has replaced emigration as the preferred means of escape, and where the church has descended to self-pardoy in the wake of child abuse exposes, and where Tayto crisps rather than potatoes are the cheapest food and staple diet.

McDonagh has said that he was always more interested in – and influenced by – film than theatre; like any successful film, his plays are easy to characterise in apparently glib references: so The Lonesome West is Father Ted meets The Field; or Synge, but with wilder violence and humour – Riders to the Sea meets The Tinker's Wedding, perhaps. He is a fan of Quentin Tarantino, and his characters indulge in a vulgarised rural Irish dialect in a similar way to which Tarantino's characters relish their urban underground patois.

These are genre plays, though the genre pretty much belongs to McDonagh. They are like American schlock horror movies invested with a self-parodying Irish moral sensibility. Locals in Leenane are killed off (or kill themselves) with the frequency of A Nightmare on Elm Street; while the local priest agonises about his failure to stem the violence in the village and the Connor brothers obsess with their trivial moral calculus of justice, revenge and confession.

As genre plays go, The Lonesome West is slick and entertaining, and was heartily received at the Civic in Tallaght during its national tour. Frank McCusker and Lalor Roddy's double act as the emotionally stunted Connor brothers is a gem of a comic pairing, laden with violent intent.

McDonagh delights in the ineptitude of his parish priest, in the gombeen qualities of the Connor brothers, in the brazenness of the young temprtress Girleen – and he pushes all these qualities to ludicrous extremes. He relishes the vulgarity of his fictionalised village of Leenane, where a succession of violent deaths is noted chiefly for the quality of the vol-au-vents at the house after the funeral. He stirs up a potent mix of slapstick, farce and satire, dosed with a Tarantino-like measure of gratuitous violence.

And he has a perculiar, and rare, ability to turn it serious – one which is under-exploited in this high-octane production. McDonagh can turn from macarbre comedy to pathos in a matter of lines. A scene that is preposterously violent or vulgar can suddenly appear to be tragic.

Director Mikel Murfi should relish this, for it's precisely that ability that underwrites all great clowns, and Murfi was trained by Jacques Lecoq, one of the greats. There are moments in McDonagh's script when the bottom falls out of the black comedy to reveal a gut-wrenching emptiness. He is as good at writing loneliness as he is at writing vitriol. Yet these moments don't quite have the edge in this production. The Father Welsh character is McDonagh's vehicle for self-awareness and empathy in this play; yet Enda Kilroy plays him so deadpan throughout that these nuances are lost, or under-exploited.

For all the strengths in McDonagh's writing, the play is little more than a sketch, a few scenes elaborating a fairly thin idea. There is a gaping hole in it structurally, with the reading of an elaborate and prosaic suicide note by Father Welsh, which is done by the character from the grave. Letters are tricky things dramatically; director Murfi has Enda Kilroy standing awkwardly on a platform above the set and racing through the letter at ridiculous speed. Kilroy gets a spontaneous applause at the end, but it is for the pyrotechnics of his delivery rather than its sensitivity.

One audience member says to her friend while leaving, laughing, "it'd put you right off Tayto". This is precisely what sitcoms thrive on – taking the most mundane details of everyday life and imbuing them with a comic, and even vulgar or violent – significance that is as funny as it is repulsive. Michael Keegan Dolan did this in The Bull, though with more beauty and greater historical resonance. For all that, The Lonesome West makes a pretty good sitcom.