Pat Shortt is back in black comedy
MICHAEL MOFFATT SHOW OF THE WEEK
A Skull In Connemara The Olympia, until Sept 1
Isometimes wonder if Martin McDonagh, in his west of Ireland plays, is savaging the west and the people who live there, or if he’s delivering an antidote to films like The Quiet Man where even the rough stuff is drowned in whimsical charm.
There’s none of that with McDonagh. The casual brutality of his characters is the darkest of black comedy. It’s as if they live lives of such banal boredom and quiet desperation that the odd murder or piece of savagery is only to be expected. The laws of God and man don’t get in the way
‘Pat Shortt is in his element, although you never quite believe that he’s a wife-killer’
much, and there are no taboos about what can be lampooned.
When Mick Dowd (Pat Shortt) and his dozy young helper Mairtín are knocking hell out of human skulls with wooden mallets on Mick’s table they do it to the strains of Dana singing All Kinds Of Everything. That mixture of irreverence and soupy song is classic McDonagh. And Skull is a very funny play given very funny treatment, although it does have its slow moments, especially in the first half. Where else would you have a serious discussion on the issue of whether it’s better to be drowned in your own urine or your vomit?
But the serious sub-plot about Mick’s wife that would give the play a stronger balance gets lost amid the wackiness. The comic element trumps everything. At times it feels like a parody of The Playboy Of The Western World, with a skit on the gravediggers in Hamlet thrown in for good measure.
The surplus of skulls is the unlikely result of an overloaded graveyard that needs old coffins to be dug up to make way for new bodies. Seven years is the best a body can hope for. It’s seven years since Mick’s wife went down and he appears reluctant to dig her up. Has he something to hide about her death? That’s the essence of the plot that never gets very far.
The local Garda (Patrick Ryan), is a kind of Keystone Kops figure, who has strong suspicions about Mick, but his hopes of promotion are threatened by his problem distinguishing ‘vague insinuations from insults’, and ‘hearsay from circumstantial evidence’.
Maria McDermottroe is a splendid old booze-loving bingo cheat, and Jarlath Tivnan as the gormless Mairtín, almost steals the show spewing out and receiving highly inventive insults. Pat Shortt is in his element in the comic dialogues, although you never quite believe that he’s a wife-killer. But the four performers knit everything together beautifully into a piece of anarchic comedy that could even be taken as a skit on the whole genre of detective mysteries.