The Lonesome West review: a mixed stab at Martin McDonagh

The Lonesome West

Everyman, Cork

***

Only Martin McDonagh could make the importance of vol-au-vents to a funeral in the west of Ireland a theme of subversive hilarity, but subversion is McDonagh’s comic gift. It might almost be called his passion in authorial terms, except that emotional fervour is a favourite victim, always available for annihilation.

The Lonesome West is the third part of his Leenane Trilogy, which offers a sardonic dissection of perceptions, attitudes and expectations accepted as common in rural Ireland. Rural as in west and Ireland as in Catholic, that is: there is never any leeway in McDonagh's geography. Nor is there in his scripts and certainly not in this entertaining Blood in the Alley production, where phrasing, timing and projection are crucial, and Dervla MacManus provides a set of stark and efficient symbolism.

Director Geoff Gould and sound designer Rob Moloney have introduced the Stunning to brew up a storm in the scene breaks, an anarchic connective tissue fusing the rivalries of two brothers into a murderous and irredeemable competition. Martin Lucey and Denis Foley fit their characters neatly into a village that the despairing parish priest describes as the murder capital of Europe, and their volcanic exchanges, from dormant to active, irradiate the second act.

But here, the theatrical demands of McDonagh’s farce have to be taken seriously if the power of his writing and of his malicious insight are to be conveyed. This is not Synge or O’Casey but the need for vocal skill is much the same, and an unembellished conversational style, as offered by Feadha Ní Chaoimhe’s Girleen or Rowan Finken’s demented Fr Walsh/Welsh, can’t match Gould’s rollicking pace or McDonagh’s relentless satire. They just don’t rollick enough.

Until August 29th