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by Martin McDonagh, directed by Jackie Maxwell

Canadian Stage Company, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

January 17-February 9, 2002

"Not a Beauty"

After the success here in 1999 of "The Beauty Queen of Leenane", the Canadian Stage Company takes us once again into the pitch black comic world of British playwright Martin McDonagh.  Theatre-goers expecting another taut, intense play like "Beauty Queen" will be disappointed by the much looser structure of "The Lonesome West".  Difficulties in acting and direction only exacerbate the problem.

"The Lonesome West" (1997) is the third part of McDonagh's Leenane Trilogy.  Given that CanStage is showing interest in McDonagh about five years after London, Seattle and New York, one wonders why it couldn't have next presented the second play in the series "A Skull in Connemara" (also 1997).  Seattle and New York saw them out of order but that's no reason why we should.  Events from "Beauty Queen" and "Skull" are mentioned in "Lonesome West" and obsess one of its four characters.  Themes and imagery continues from one play to the next and the destruction concluding "Lonesome West" would have far more resonance if we had seen "Skull" before it.

Regarded in isolation, "The Lonesome West" seems as if McDonagh had relocated Sam Shepard's "True West" (1981) to an impoverished Irish village.  Both concern an unending struggle of two brothers for dominance--one neat, one slovenly.  Both have associations beyond the story of Cain and Abel in reflecting an irreducible conflict at the centre of a nation's culture.  Both feature as a symbol the proliferation of a material object--toasters in Shepard, religious figurines in McDonagh.  The primary difference is that Shepard shows how the two brothers change places; McDonagh shows how, despite everything, they stay the same.

The play begins as the two Connor brothers, Valene and Coleman, return with Father Welsh, from the funeral of the brothers' father.  We learn fairly soon that the Connors' father has not died in an accident.  Rather Coleman admits he shot him because he insulted his hairstyle.  This fact links "Lonesome" to that most famous of Irish plays, JM Synge's "The Playboy of the Western World" (1907).  The difference is that in Synge Christie Mahon is acclaimed as a hero for being so daring.  In McDonagh Leenane has seen so much familial murder that the only one outraged is Father Welsh.  Indeed, Leenane is so rife with mortal and venial sin, not to mention an inability say two words without blasphemy or profanation, it has driven Father Welsh to drink and a perpetual state of religious crisis.  Meanwhile the Connor brothers have knock-down fights about the most trivial things--crisps, poteen, ladies' magazines--while unphased by murder, suicide, torture until an unexpected event gives them pause.

The prime difficulty with the play is the unedifying spectacle of the brothers' fighting that makes up the entire first act.  Despite a certain humour in the absurdity of it all, it rapidly becomes tedious because it is all based on the same formula: important issues are trivialized and trivial issues are magnified.  The first act ends without a new plot development and offers little incentive for an audience to return.  Luckily, a new tone and a new development occur at the beginning of Act 2 with the conversation of Father Welsh and the local poteen delivery girl Girleen that belatedly puts the constant rowing of Act 1 into a larger, symbolic perspective.  We come to se the Connor brothers as two sides of the Irish soul--Valene the iconolater who understands the acquisition of religious figurines but not what they should represent, and Coleman the iconoclast ready to smash any icon, religious or personal, that Valene sets up.  The two are inseparable because the one needs the other to give him purpose. 

Since the plot only begins to take shape in Act 2, a director needs to help in pointing the way.  Jackie Maxwell, normally very sensitive to this kind of problem,  highlights only the rough comedy of Act 1.  She allows Father Welsh's religious crisis to seem like just another joke, when Act 2 shows otherwise.  We have no hint of Girleen's affection for Father Welsh.  And worst of all, she gives us little sense, obvious in the title, that the bachelor brothers' constant fighting is related to a deep unhappiness with their situation.  By missing the various indicators in Act 1, the act acquires a numbingly uniform tone of pointless brashness.  By Act 2 it is too late to generate interest in the characters. 

 

The different acting styles of the actors playing the Connors pose additional problems.  As Coleman, Randy Hughson gives such a natural performance one might assume the actor was really as grubby and mean-spirited as the character were it not for a certain sense of self-satisfaction that occasionally creeps in that undermines the illusion.  As Valene, Benedict Campbell gives a much more restrained performance than usual.  He is fine in the quieter passages but as soon as greater emotion is called for he blusters and becomes wholly artificial.  Unlike with Hughson, the detailed mannerisms Maxwell has given him come off as studied rather than natural.  The two thus don't seem as much like two brothers as they should, especially two that have lived together for far too long.           

David Storch is excellent as Father Welsh.  The sincerity of his emotion is quite moving in the first scene of Act 2 and in his recitation of the letter Welsh has written the brothers.  Tara Rosling as Girleen is an intense presence throughout but does not blossom as a character until Act 2.   

Sue LePage has designed the realistically unkempt farmhouse room where the action is set, convincing us of the Connors' poverty while still filling the too-large proscenium of the Bluma Appel Theatre.  She has the cut of the brothers' outfits show their relation while their differing colour patterns set them apart.   The play doesn't give Louise Guinand much opportunity for atmospheric lighting until the quiet scene on the pier that begins Act 2.  John Stead has choreographed the frequent knock-down fights making them at once comic and painfully realistic.    

Now that we have seen the first and third installments of the Leenane Trilogy, I do hope that Canadian Stage will programme "A Skull in Connemara" so that we can belatedly reconstruct the arc of meaning that McDonagh intended.  If CanStage does, it will need more incisive direction and a cast without a weak link.  Otherwise, it will be, as in this "Lonesome West" only half as effective as it could be.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: David Storch. ©2011 Globe Theatre.