Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✭✩✩
by Martin McDonagh, directed by Carmine Lucarelli
Unit 102 Actors Co., Unit 102Theatre, Toronto
June 19-29, 2013
Toby: “Yes, you screwed up, hand-wise, but don’t worry about it.”
Unit 102 Theatre is currently giving the Toronto premiere of Martin McDonagh’s grisly 2010 comedy A Behanding in Spokane. Though born in London, McDonagh is famous for his plays set in Ireland with their Quentin Tarantino-like mixture of violence and humour. Behanding has the same mix but it is McDonagh’s first play set in the United States and it’s hard not to think that McDonagh has watered down his play to appeal to an American audience. While the play is intended as a comedy, people familiar with The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996) or The Pillowman (2003) by the author will expect more depth.
The play is set in a grungy hotel room in a small town in Arizona where a man named Carmichael (Luis Fernandes) has come in search of his missing left hand. The hand was severed when Carmichael was attacked by “hillbillies” in Spokane when he was 17. When we meet him now he has been searching for the missing hand for 27 years. His quest has led him from one deception to another from body parts dealers across the country, so when he meets the young couple, the black man Toby (Ronnie Rowe) and his white girlfriend Marilyn (Sam Coyle), who claim to have his hand, he fears yet another letdown. His fears are well founded since Toby and Marilyn are foolish enough to try to pass off the hand of an Australian Aboriginal as his. And this just won’t fly with the racist and dangerously demented Carmichael, who plans to exact his revenge.
In Behanding we have the feeling that McDonagh is imitating himself rather than exploring new territory. As in The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001), we have a violent deranged central character who also has a sentimental soft spot – Mad Padraic and his cat in Lieutenant, Carmichael and his mum in Behanding. As in A Skull in Connemara (1997) and The Lonesome West (1997), there is a proliferation of objects – skulls and figurines in the earlier two, severed hands in Behanding. As in Beauty Queen, events unfold as they do because an important message entrusted to a a dubious character is not delivered, or as here an important phone call is not made.
As in his other plays McDonagh deliberately pushes the boundaries of what is acceptable as material for comedy. The trade in body parts is just the starting point in Behanding. Political correctness is obliterated as Carmichael repeatedly calls Toby “nigger” and “fag” while Toby calls Carmichael a “cracker”. That Marilyn should ask Carmichael to tone down his language of homophobia and racism in the midst of the dialogue’s steady stream of four-letter words is one of the play’s funniest moments. McDonagh does intend to make American audiences cringe at the sight of Toby’s deferential attitude to Carmichael and his tendency to burst into tears in front of a white man giving commands, even if the distraught Toby is only try to save his life. Harder to take is the speech McDonagh gives the hotel receptionist Mervyn (David Lafontaine), who says he wishes his high school had had one of those school massacres he’s read about because it would have given him the chance to be a hero, that is if he wasn’t shot. If you laugh at this it’s not because it’s funny but because it’s in such incredibly bad taste.
The play’s plot doesn’t offer much room for development. Once Carmichael discovers the couple’s initial deception, i.e. immediately, the questions is, “What will he do once he finds that the couple do not have ‘another hand’ stashed back at home?” McDonagh relies much too heavily on a single type of comedy – obtuseness – to draw the action out. This is funniest when it appears the first time when Marilyn repeatedly fails to picks up Toby’s signals about the “other hand back home” as a means to get Carmichael to leave them. The technique is far too drawn out the next time when Toby and Marilyn repeatedly fail to impress on the self-important dunce Mervyn the urgency of preventing Carmichael’s impromptu bomb from going off and of calling the police.
If you life tidy endings, you won’t find one here. McDonagh gives us no clue why Carmichael’s suitcase has the bizarre content it does. And what Carmichael’s discovery at the end means is a total mystery.
Despite these flaws, the show is often very funny. It is anchored by Luis Fernandes’ terrific performance as Carmichael. He almost visibly radiates intensity as he tries to keep his rage under control which he and those around hem know could explode any minute. Fernandes portrays Carmichael as a man completely worn down by what he seems to know is a pointless quest since the hand will be useless even if he finds it. But the quest, as if he were a parody of Captain Ahab, is all that keeps him going. At the same time Fernandes is an expert at deadpan comedy and his long phone conversation with his 70-year-old mother, clearly as loony as he is, is one of the comic high points of the show.
Ronnie Rowe and Sam Coyle are excellent as Toby and Marilyn. Toby is the most level-headed of the four characters. Rowe plays Toby's self-abasement before Carmichael clearly as a ploy for survival, not a character trait, and he makes Toby’s frustration with the imperceptive Marilyn and the dimwitted Mervyn the single most humorous aspect of the play. Coyle has her moments to shine. The physical comedy of Marilyn’s attempt to reach a suitcase while handcuffed to a radiator is priceless and her sudden idea to come on to Mervyn sexually to get his attention is very well done.
David Lafontaine’s performance as Mervyn is hard to figure out. He delivers his lines in a highly artificial manner all the while adopting the body language of Martin Short’s character Ed Grimley. A (supposedly) reformed speed addict, Mervyn combines dimwittedness with delusions of grandeur and fantasies of heroism. Lafontaine gives us mostly a self-involved nerd whose behaviour is both obtrusive and obstructive but not for any clearly defined reasons.
Designer Adam Belanger has created one of the grottiest hotel room sets you’ve ever seen with peeling wallpaper, missing door mouldings and baseboards and insulation foam oozing from around the window. Director Carmine Lucarelli could move the action along more smoothly and could generate a greater sense of tension. What should be clearer right from the start is that the play, for all its gruesome content, is primarily a comedy. We really ought to laugh at the first action in the play when Carmichael phones his mum right after shooting someone in his closet.
Fans of McDonagh, whether of his plays or films (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths), will want to see his latest work. Behanding is much more like an extended sketch on Saturday Night Live than an important work like The Pillowman, but it still offers much bizarre, transgressive fun.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Luis Fernandes. ©2013 Lindsay Junkin.
For tickets, visit www.unit102theatre.com.
2013-06-20
A Behanding in Spokane