Peter Viney's Blog

A Very Very Very Dark Matter
by Martin McDonagh

Directed by Matthew Dunster
Designer Anna Fleischle
Music James Maloney

The Bridge Theatre
Southwark, London 

Saturday 20th October 2018, 14.30

Tom Waits – narrator

Johnetta Eula’ Mae Ackles  – Marjory
Alistair Benson or Noah Brignull or James Roberts  – Charles Jnr
Elizabeth Berrington – Catherine Dickens
Paul Bradley- Press Man
Jim Broadbent- Hans Christian Anderson
Phil Daniels – Charles  Dickens
Regan Garcia or Leo Hart ot Austin Taylor – Walter
Graeme Hawley – Barry
Audrey Hayhurst or AmeliaWalter or Annabelle Westenholz-Smith – Kate / Ingrid
Kundai Kanyama – Ogechi
Lee Knight- Edvard
Jamie McKie- Crowd
Ryan Pope – Dirk
Alice Selwyn – Crowd
Anthony Taylor – Crowd

The links to Hangmen are strong … same director, same designer, two of the same cast. It is the World Premiere of the new Martin McDonagh play, and what with the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri at the Academy Awards, and a Michael Grandage major production of The Lieutenant of Inishmore in the West End, McDonagh is having a very (very very) good year. Putting on a new McDonagh play is a major coup for Nicholas Hynter and The Bridge Theatre.

Where do you start to describe this play? It is theatre as a magical space, it’s an essay on what storytelling might be, and on what a story is, it’s a bizarre comedy, it’s a horror story. It’s absurd in a 60s way, it has echoes of Flann O’Brien and The Third Policeman. Weird stuff happens.

Hans Christian Anderson’s Attic. Johnetta Eula’ Mae Ackles as Marjory, Jim Broadbent as Anderson

The play opens with a large box swinging like a pendulum in Hans Christian Anderson’s attic, which is all twisted wood and hanging puppets with a view out on Copenhagen’s skyline. Tom Waits narrates, placing us there. Yes, the deep resonant recorded voice of THE Tom Waits, the singer-songwriter. Set design and use of the Bridge’s state-of the art lifts and stage are splendid throughout.

How can you write a play which requires a reduced height actor (aka dwarf / midget), playing a Congolese Pygmy, who has one foot? Anderson chopped it off to stop her escaping.

Then how can you write a play that requires a performing cat as in The Lieutenant of Inishmore?  Ask Martin McDonagh. I was trying to work out how they had faked the missing foot (she has a wide skirt and I wondered if she were kneeling on something with one leg), until I looked at the rehearsal photos in the programme. Johnetta Eula Mae Ackles has one foot. It is also her professional debut. She is American. She is brilliant. I hope she didn’t have to spend the twenty minutes before the play began in that swinging box, but I suspect she did.

Jim Broadbent plays Hans Christian Anderson, and I knew very little about Anderson as a person. In the programme Marina Warner says:

Anderson projected onto the Shadow (in the story) his own tormented character, his craving for attention, his social gracelessness, his conflict over his sexuality and his inability to inspire love.

Jim Broadbent as Hans Christian Anderson

Jim Broadbent portrays all this, with Anderson as cheery, self-absorbed, insensitive, almost autistic. He is dressed as might be the Wizard of Oz or Willy Wonka … the 19th century booster.  He takes everything literally, at face value. No imagination nor empathy … but in his attic (alter ego) he has a captive Congolese Pygmy woman in that swinging box, who really creates the stories he takes credit for. For many fiction writers, sometimes characters and stories seem to come from nowhere and have a self-propelling life of their own. Margery, as he calls her, failing to remember her African name, is the source, imprisoned in a box, enslaved. A Muse? Maybe his anima or female side? One he treats with sadistic cruelty too. A very very very dark matter.

Phil Daniels as Charles Dickens

Then bring in Charles Dickens (Phil Daniels), who has had a similar Congolese muse / co-author / anima locked up in his attic, and she is Margery’s sister. She doesn’t appear standing closely next to anyone else, and I guess two African reduced height actors was two big an ask. Anderson goes to visit Dickens in London, and we get a total and instant scene change as a wall drops and a whole dining table rises into view. In a hilarious scene he dines with Dickens and his wife, Catherine (Elizabeth Berrington). Dickens is desperate to get rid of Anderson who has been there for ‘five fucking weeks’ and is driving them and their three kids mad with his total lack of empathy and language problems. Dickens effs and blinds gloriously, as do the wife and kids. Catherine refers to Charles’ mistresses with some venom.

L to R: Phil Daniels as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Berrington as Catherine Dickens, Jim Broadbent as Hans Christian Anderson (with London set)

Ah, Dickens … I loved Phil Daniels as Dickens. I’ve adapted A Tale of Two Cities as a reader for EFL students and I’ve edited EFL adaptations of Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. Dickens adaptors know that Dickens, writing his novels as serials for newspapers, must surely have been paid by the word. He can spend an entire page hovering around a narrative point that can be made in a couple of sentences. Padding? Oh, yes. This is why people praise his descriptions. They take up lots of space and use lots of words. After a few chapters, Dickens is incredibly irritating if you’re adapting it, though cutting swathes of text to the kernel is easy, but tedious. So I loved the idea that his wonderful plots behind the verbiage came from someone else entirely, the pygmy in the attic, and he was the foul-mouthed businessman selling them by the word. As it says in the play the clues are all there … Tiny Tim, Little Nell, Little Dorrit. I’ve also edited ELT versions of The Little Mermaid, The Emperor’s New Clothes (both get very funny mentions in the play, the latter in a perplexed letter from the King of Spain) and The Emperor & The Nightingale. The second two stories are so much part of the collective now, that most people only associate the first with Anderson.

There is a programme essay on the history of the Congo, focussing on King Leopold II of Belgium, who established the huge area as a private possession to exploit and mine for profit. Leopold set up his regime there in 1884. I read the essay in the lobby before the play, wondering what it possibly had to do with Hans Christian Anderson, who died in 1875 or Charles Dickens who died in 1870. The Little Mermaid, important in the play, dates from 1837, nearly fifty years before Leopold’s murderous Congo regime.

I hadn’t known much detail. Atrocities were standard, with hands and feet being cut off to ensure obedience in a slave state, fifty years after slavery had been abolished elsewhere. Ten million died. It was hard to see how this connects to Anderson’s Copenhagen so many decades earlier.

Johnetta Eula’ Mae Ackles as Marjory, Jim Broadbent as Anderson

Margery in 1837 is the Congolese curiosity, a freak, a trophy. Where did McDonagh get this Congolese angle? Maybe doing his In Bruges film and seeing the statues of Leopold in Belgium, and Leopold described succinctly and accurately in the play as a c*nt.

That bizarre story link to the Congo, connects via the ‘red men’, two blood covered Belgian soldiers from Leopold’s era who appear, first as a ghostly presence when Anderson receives an award for The Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, then later as more solid figures. Their blood soaked torsos look like Frankensteins’s monster with stitched scars where they must have been dismembered with machetes. The blood is also from cutting off so many hands and feet.  It is explained that they have time travelled from that Leopold II Congolese future, where Margery will later meet and kill them. No, I don’t fully follow it either. I suppose their intent is to get back and kill Margery before she kills them in the future?  They are a double act, Dirk and Barry (Graeme Hawley and Ryan Pope from Hangmen). Their Belgium references get loud laughs. This may be a Brexit phenomenon, but I think of a secondhand bookshop that had a number of books in a cabinet whose sales value was their titles, such as Enid Blyton’s The Gay Story Book and The Book of Queer Stories. Next to them was The Pleasures of Belgium. We have found the inherent naffness of Belgium funny for years. Odd. The food is wonderful, as is some of the architecture.

I was surprised how many of the cast appear so very briefly indeed … the scene where Anderson picks up the Danish award for The Little Mermaid has several of them, including Edvard, who we are told later Anderson secretly fancies. Three are just “the crowd.” They don’t appear again. Kundai Kanyama as Ogechi, Margery’s sister has a ghostlike minute or so on stage. And doesn’t appear again. We need three Dickens kids for one scene, though they add to the crowd, plus a little girl, Ingrid whose name Anderson can’t remember. Dickens wife (Elizabeth Berrington) has great impact, but has just the crowd scene and the dinner scene. They basically appear once. It’s pretty inefficient in casting terms. A lot of people will spend virtually all the play in the dressing room.

It is short – 90 minutes, no interval.

PROGRAMME
Article on Martin McDonagh by Fintan O’Toole; Article “By The Virtue of The Dark” by Marina Warner, and the essay on the history of The Congo by Mpalive-Hangson Msiska. I’d say an essential purchase for all three, and the Congo stuff may seem out of nowhere without reading it. All excellent.

THEATRE
It is one of the best spaces in the country, let alone London. They boast of their extensive women’s loos (rightly) but it takes a very long time indeed to get from the front stalls up to the back – no side exits and each row empties in turn as if at a wedding in reverse, and there are some very slow people ahead, so the line at the end is long anyway by the time you reach it. I always wonder why people with serious movement problems decide they should go first in theatre corridors and gangways. When Karen had a foot operation and had problems walking, we always waited and let those able to walk at a normal pace go first. On the loos, Karen complained that the double doors hit her twice. Going in and coming out!

Rating: Five stars

*****
(but only if I don’t have to explain the plot in detail).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
Michael Billington sums up the reactions. I’m glad to see we’re on the positive side, along with him. Quentin Letts and Christopher Hart were incredibly angered by the play. Christopher Hart tends to bring in history, and points out that Leopold’s troops doing the killing in the Congo were African Mercenaries with Belgian senior officers.

four star
Michael Billington, The Guardian ****

It’s a play you will either like or loathe. For me, it confirms that McDonagh is a genuine original with a talent to disturb.

Will Gompetz, BBC ****
Nick Wells,Radio Times ****

three star
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ***
Paul Taylor, The Independent ***
Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out, ***

Did I mention the ghost Belgians? Or the time travelling? Or the haunted accordion? Or the rambling voiceover from the actual Tom Waits? And that all this happens in just an hour and 20 minutes? ‘A Very Very Very Dark Matter’ is a car crash in many respects, but the actual production has a sort of malevolent brio that lingers long after you’ve given up trying to figure out what McDonagh was on when he wrote it.
Andrzej Lukowski

two star
Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard **
Fergus Morgan, What’s On Stage **

one star
Christopher Hart, Sunday Times *

Martin McDonagh’s theatrical mingling of historical atrocity and sick jokes couldn’t be more repellent …  McDonagh has freqiuently said he doesn’t like the theatre and won’t write any more for it. Let’s hope so. Christopher Hart

Quentin Letts, Daily Mail *

This one’s a stinker – suitable only for theatrical rubber-neckers. Quentin Letts

Robert Gore-Langton, Mail online *
(He uses the same “stinks” line as Letts)

LINKS ON THIS BLOG:

MARTIN McDONAGH
The Lieutenant of Inishmore, RSC 2001
The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Grandage Company, 2018
The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh, Grandage Season, West End 2013
The Beauty Queen of Leenane– Arena Theatre, Poole 2018
Hangmen, by Martin McDonagh, Royal Court, London 2015
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (FILM)

MATTHEW DUNSTER (Director)
True West, by Sam Shepard, West End 2018
Much Ado About Nothing, Globe, 2017
Plastic, by Marius von Mayenberg,  Bath, 2017
Imogen (Cymbeline Renamed and Reclaimed) – Globe 2016
Hangmen, by Martin McDonagh, Royal Court 2015
Love’s Sacrifice by John Ford, RSC 2015

PHIL DANIELS
King Lear, Chichester 2017 (Fool)
Knight of The Burning Pestle, Wanamaker 2104 (The Citizen)
Antony & Cleopatra, The Globe 2014 (Endobarbus)

GRAEME HAWLEY
Hangmen, by Martin McDonagh, Royal Court 2015

RYAN POPE
Hangmen, by Martin McDonagh, Royal Court 2015

JIM BROADBENT
The Iron Lady (FILM)
Another Year (FILM)