The Banshees of Inisherin is a McDonagh masterpiece

There’s something a tad Father Ted about The Banshees of Inisherin, the new film from Martin McDonagh, where the older of two long-term friends – both of whom live on a small, rural island off the coast of Ireland – finds the rather naïve behaviour of the younger one to be exasperating.

It's evokes John Huston's The Quiet Man too, in some of the more comedic and 'blarney' moments.

There’s much humour, certainly, in McDonagh's piece, but that’s where simplistic similarities end, because there’s also something much darker and much more philosophical here – a story that can be viewed as allegory of many things. 

It’s 1923 and the Irish Civil War is raging – a point the viewer is reminded of throughout, as canon fire and gunshots interrupt events from across the sea on the mainland.

 

Folk musician Colm Doherty has decided that he no longer wishes to talk to his long-time friend and drinking buddy Pádraic Súilleabháin – a nice man, but too dull for Colm.

 

The younger man is distressed and appeals to his erstwhile friend. But Colm wants to spend his time thinking and composing music. He doesn’t ‘hate’ Pádraic, but equally, he doesn’t care if brushing him aside is not “nice” – because “nice” doesn’t get you remembered after death and time is passing.

 

When Pádraic persists in trying to change Colm’s mind – helped by troubled young boy Dominic ­– the older man threatens to chop off a finger with shears if he ever does so again.

 

McDonagh has created an extraordinary work about realising one’s own mortality and the existential angst that goes with that. Colm is desperate to create a legacy for himself – and sitting for two hours listening to Pádraic relate what he’s found in his beloved miniature donkey’s faeces isn’t going to do that.

 

Pádraic's sister Siobhán attempts to stop the escalating events, but she herself is herself increasingly desperate to escape this remote community, where the local postmistress is an uber gossip who openly reads people’s mail and challenges people to tell her any news they’ve received.

 

It's a stunning film. Beautiful to look at, including in all its bleakness (I come from Cumbria’s Eden Valley, so know what bleak beauty means).

 

Beautifully filmed by Ben Davis and beautifully paced, with a superb score from Carter Burwell, this is a stunning picture that will stay with you for a very, very long time. It even references, among other things, Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 classic, The Seventh Seal.

 

The cast is superb. As Pádraic, this is without doubt Colin Farrell’s finest screen performance thus far. Brendan Gleesan, as Colm, is not far behind. Kerry Condon as Siobhán is excellent and massive plaudits too, to Barry Keoghan as Dominic – a seriously complex role.

 

See this. Revel in it. And set your mind free to think about all that it could be saying.

 

 

A very, very, very dark – but funny – matter

Copenhagen, the 19th century: Danish celebrity author Hans Christian Anderson is regaling an audience with his latest fairy tale, The Little Mermaid.

There are celebratory fireworks and showers of admiration for the writer, but there are also ghostly figures.

And when Anderson returns home, climbing to the attic of his house, it is to discuss these ghosts with Marjory, a disabled Congolese pygmy, who he keeps in a box and who writes the stories for him.

But why doesn’t she try to escape; is she and her situation unique and what does Charles Dickens have to do with it all?

Martin McDonagh’s latest play, A Very Very Very Dark Matter, is going to upset people. Though to be strictly accurate, it’s still previewing until 24 October and it’s already provoked Indignant of Islington and Vexed of Vauxhall to express their horror online.

One can imagine this work will trigger an orgy of offence.

Taken at the most simple face value, the play laughs at colonialism and thumbs its nose at the crimes of empires. And because McDonagh has written a funny play, the audience laughs along and, therefore, becomes complicit.

Except that this is not supposed to be taken at face value, and only a monumental naïf or someone utterly dedicated to a peacock-like display of their social justice warrior credentials would not understand or would pretend not to understand what McDonagh is doing.

And incidentally, if you push that idea that he’s genuinely laughing at the crimes of imperialism, then you’re saying that the black cast members are Uncle Toms, and I would suggest people don’t go down that route.

There isn’t much of a plot, as such. Like Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, this is more of a meditation on a number of themes.

Not least among these is the trivialising of the treatment of the crimes of colonialism – an attitude that has reared its head again in recent years, with continuing exceptionalism and the concomitant belief of some Brexiteers that, once free from the EU, the UK can build Empire II and indeed, the rest of the world is ready to rush into our arms to give us the bestest ever trade deals with only five minutes discussion needed. Because we’re Britain, doncha know.

Of course, the same can be said of the Trump-era US too, with the crude and fact-free racism of the MAGA crowd, convincing itself that ‘true America’ is WASP America.

Such attitudes never went away, but increased nationalism elsewhere around the globe means they’re re-emerging. And therefore, it is important to remind people of just what nationalism and colonialism means in reality.

McDonagh – a writer in whom the Irish gothic tradition meets London-Irish experience, with punk mixed in (as Fintan O’Toole’s excellent programme essay notes) – is ideally suited to push boundaries so that, while A Very Very Very Dark Matter is very funny, it isn’t what you’d describe as ‘comfortable’.

In concentrating on Belgian imperialism – and the genocide in what was the Congo – the play raises what will, for many, be history that they are not familiar with. In pointing up the rape of the region for resources, he even manages a sideswipe at environmentally-holier-than-thou cyclists, noting that while Leopold II’s publicly-stated intention (as with other countries) was to ‘civilise’ and Christianise, the less public one was the desire for ivory and rubber – here, with the latter used for bicycle tires.

A Very Very Very Dark Matter is probably not for the faint-hearted or those who get upset by ‘bad language’ – it’s gloriously sweary in a very Irish way.

It’s short – 90 minutes with no interval – angry and funny at the same time, and defies easy labels.

Director Matthew Dunster has done an excellent job and Anna Fleische’s design is superb.

As Marjory, Johnetta Eula’Mae Ackles, on her debut, is simply outstanding and more than holds her own with her massively experienced co-star.

Jim Broadbent as Anderson is a delight as the bumbling, eccentric and crass writer, living off Marjory’s talent and, all the while, pleading with her that *his* colonial crimes aren’t as bad as those of others. And his swearing is a glory.

Phil Daniels as “Charles FUCKING DICKENS!” is a hoot too, and getting Tom Waits to record the role of narrator adds both to the fairy-tale aspect of the piece, as well as the sinister and eerie nature of it.

Bloody brilliant.

• A Very Very Very Dark Matter, is at London’s bridgetheatre.co.uk until 6 January 2019.

Three Billboards: brutal and funny, with hope at its heart

It’s not difficult to see how Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, has gained seven Oscar nominations. It’s only difficult to see how it hasn’t gained more, because this is a simply superb film.

Frustrated by the lack of any police progress in finding out who raped and murdered her daughter,  Mildred Hayes rents three billboards on a backroad within sight of her home – and near where the crime happened – to ask: “RAPED WHILE DYING”, “AND STILL NO ARRESTS?” and “HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY?”

TV takes note. The billboards upset some of the townspeople, including Sheriff Bill Willoughby and the racist, perpetually drunk officer Jason Dixon. Mildred and her son are harassed and threatened. A local priest tries to cow her.

Her ex-husband visits – his naive, 19-year-old girlfriend Penelope in tow – to blame her for their daughter’s death.

But Mildred won’t give in.

Willoughby is sympathetic and looks again at the case, but he’s dying of pancreatic cancer. After one last perfect day with his wife and two young daughters, he ends his own life.

Dixon, his anger bubbling over, hits out.

Written and directed by Martin McDonagh, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is an extraordinary film. Variously described as a ‘crime film’, a ‘tragicomedy’ and ‘darkly comic’, it is all those and far more.

There is a savage brutality about it – not just in some of the violence, which is never gratuitous – but also in the emotions of people struggling to deal with grief and loss and anger. That it never crosses into mawkishness or sentimentality is an incredible achievement.

The writing is superb. When Willoughby’s suicide letters to his wife, to Mildred and to Dixon are read by them (voiced by Woody Harrelson), they combine an earthiness with a poetic beauty that is searing.

Ben Davis’s cinematography is more than a match, giving us a sense of vast, natural beauty, yet with those three billboards as a constant jarring reminder that something far darker is at the root of all this.

The performances are exemplary.

In a strong supporting cast, Peter Dinklage as a friend of Mildred, Caleb Landry Jones as the ad agency rep and Samara Weaving as Penelope, are all excellent.

Harrelson and Sam Rockwell as Willoughby and Dixon respectively, are both up for supporting actor Oscars. It’s hard to know who you’d pick.

But Frances McDormand is simply outstanding as Mildred. The anger, the pain and the guilt are raw; constantly etched across her face, yet so subtly conveyed. It is a blistering turn and it’s almost impossible to imagine that she will not take home her second golden statue come March.

Three Billboards is about flawed human beings struggling with their demons. They don’t overcome all their flaws, but somewhere in the darkness, McDonagh’s magnificent work suggests that humans can grow; that redemption and release from the pain are possible.

And throughout, there are little notes to suggest that the cycle of life goes on: flowers and a young deer are just two.

If there’s a moral here, it’s in Penelope’s adage, memorised from a bookmark, that “anger only begets more anger”. It’s a line that’s played for laughs and then dropped, yet it’s the truth at the heart of the film.

‘Crime film’, ‘tragicomedy’ … whatever. In the end, this is a deeply humane work that transcends easy labels.

Go on, go on, go on ... Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan

Go on, go on, go on ...

Attending a performance of The Cripple of Inishmaan on Friday was, in many ways, one of the odder evenings in the theatrical part of my life.

A brief background note is worth making here: after years of going to the theatre very regularly for reviewing purposes - sometimes three or even four times a week - I became a lapsed theatregoer.

It wasn’t deliberate, but happened – largely because of a lack of money and also because of a lack of being used to planning evenings out and actually booking tickets.

In recent years, we’ve made an effort to start going ... well, if not ‘regularly’, then at least a few times a year.

We had seen this third play in this inaugural Michael Grandage Company season listed and thought it looked interesting, but equally thought that, for reasons of it starring Daniel ‘Harry Potter’ Radcliffe, we’d not get near tickets for all the fan girls.

As it happened, we were wrong and, because I’m automatically on the company emailing list now, having previously seen both Privates on Parade and the absolutely wonderful Peter and Alice, I received an email a couple of weeks ago telling me that tickets were still available.

We snapped up a pair.

First, the audience did include a large number of girls. As we left, The Other Half even spotted several pf them heading to the stage door with roses in hand.

But what a great way to get people to go to the theatre.

Anyway, back to the play – or most pertinantly, a play that I had no prior knowledge of.

I imagined that it was quite old – it’s set in the 1930s – and on the surface, is full of Irish stereotypes. There were times I wondered whether I was watching The Quiet Man meets Father Ted.

Yet this is a play from 1997, by Martin McDonagh, who also wrote and directed the wonderful film, In Bruges. And in many ways, this gives you a platform from which to understand this play and help you get past a sense that you're seeing Maureen O'Hara meet Pauline McLynn.

The central idea is that a film crew from Hollywood arrives in a small Irish community that struggles against the elements, to film a documentary (based on fact).

The villagers react in differing ways, but ‘Cripple’ Billy, a 17-year-old orphan with a somewhat mysterious past, who’s only pastime is staring at cows, at once sees the falseness of the celluloid hopes, but also the chance to escape his mind-numbing existence.

What McDonagh has done is to create a very funny play that leaves you with a number of questions about the nature of home and expectations, the stories that we all tell and construct around ourselves (the stereotypes are a crucial part of this) and the importance of storytelling in human experience.

It is delightfully done, and the very fact of how you personally react to the stereotypes – do you recognise them as such, how then do you react to them etc – are important elements in the questions that the writer asks about how we all react to stories and how we all portray ourselves.

As to the cast – well, it’s an excellent ensemble performance.

But special mentions to Sarah Greene as Helen and Pat Shortt as Johnnypateenmike.

And then we come to young Master Radcliffe.

If one had any worries that one would be watching Harry Potter, they disappear the moment he arrives on stage.

This is a remarkably talented young actor – perhaps far more so than many might expect. The team decided that his Billy’s disability is cerebral palsy, and Radcliffe shows enormous physical discipline in maintaining his character’s condition.

Where McDonagh doesn’t opt for easy stereotype is in his writing of Billy – this is no disabled archetype (a welcome point in these Atos times), and Radcliffe’s understated but emotionally powerful performance is exemplary.

There are no sloppy excuses for genuine depth of character – and this is why, in very large part, the play works in spite of so many apparent stereotypes.

Radcliffe is a very bright young talent – and a joy to watch.

It is an excellent evening out – and one that, perhaps unexpectedly, leaves the audience with a tantalising series of questions to muse on later.

There is a brutality about the play, but also great warmth and, ultimately, real humanity, without it ever having plunged into mawkish sentimentality – see In Bruges.

So if you get the chance – well, go on, go on, go on: you know you want to.

And if you don't, watch out for this company, because one really hopes that will be more than a one-season wonder.