DESPITE the fact that a small illuminated crucifix hangs above all three plays in Garry Hynes's extraordinary production of Martin McDonagh's astonishing trilogy, it is there as irreverently and as ironically as is much of the author's text. As the priest says in the final play, "God has no jurisdiction in this town".
From family hatreds, murders, suicides and attempted murders, from blackmail and lying, loneliness and desperation, the author has crafted three of the least likely comedies in the canon of Irish theatre. And he makes his audience laugh whenever it is not drawing in its collective breath in shocked disbelief. It is gleeful but joyless.
The Beauty Queen of Leenane, even if it has lost some of the surprise of its first viewing, is well worth seeing again and comes across as the most substantial drama of the three if only because the situation it portrays seems closer to recognisable reality than those in the other two. Anna Manahan's manipulative bullying of her desperate daughter Maureen past 40 and yearning for a man is as repulsive as ever it was, and Marie Mullen's taunting Maureen gives every required indication that she is well capable of doing serious harm to her appalling mother. Brian F. O'Byrne's Pato Dooley, the awkward would be suitor, has gained in assurance since the first outing, and Aidan McArdle wrings even more laughter out of the feckless young Ray Dooley than the brilliant Tom Murphy did in the first production.
A Skull in Connemara does not have quite the same theatrical purity of the bleak, dark, cruel, comic qualities of The Beauty Queen. It seems more of a black fantastical farce as we follow Mick Dowd, the local gravedigger, go ghoulishly through what seems to be a regular ritual of emptying old graves to make space for new corpses in the overcrowded graveyard. This time, one of the graves he must empty is that of his wife Una, who was killed in a car crash years earlier with Mick driving under the influence of excess poitin.
But was that the accidental death it seemed to be? The exhumation might reveal more and is to be supervised by the incompetent local Garda Tom Hanlon, who fancies himself as a detective.
Mick is to be assisted in his clear out of the southern side of the graveyard by Garda Hanlon's feckless young brother Mairtin (echoes of Ray Dooley in the first play), and the saga is commented upon by Maryjohnny Rafferty, the woman who comes to sip Mick's poitin with him when she is not cheating in the parish bingo sessions. One of the most macabre comic scenes ever staged in an Irish play is that in which Mick and Mairtin, both of them much the worse for poitin, dispose of the exhumed human remains with two huge wooden mallets, but it may take a true ghoul to get the full comic value from this episode.
As in the first play, the performances are superb both individually and in ensemble. Mick Lally is the lumbering Dowd, who protests his innocence of Una's murder to the end, although he might admit to another fell deed before the night is out. David Wilmot is frenetically funny as Mairtin, not least when drunk in charge of a mallet (although he should note that real drunks need to keep their feet well apart if they are not to fall over), and Brian F. O'Byrne is soulfully funny as Tom Hanlon, while Anna Manahan dissembles to great effect as the hypocritical Maryjohnny.
The third piece is The Lonesome West in which the brothers Connor, hot tempered Coleman and miserly Valene, fall to near lethal fighting with each other at the drop of a perceived insult. When we meet them they have just buried their father, who had his head blown off by a shot gun, and the deeply unhappy and likely alcoholic priest, Father Welsh, has come home with them in search of a drop of poitin after the funeral. They buy their poitin from a schoolgirl, Girleen Kelleher, who also delivers letters and is saving the poitin money to buy things from her mother's catalogue.
Father Welsh is the individual in desperation in this one he cannot find any success in his ministry (notwithstanding the assurances from the brothers that he has succeeded in getting the under 12 girls' football team into the county semifinals, and maybe - given the team's behaviour - he is right not to account that enterprise successful), and he determines to make one extreme effort to stop the brothers fighting before they kill each other.
He has already failed to get two parishioners he knows to be murderers to confess their crimes and seems unlikely to succeed in establishing fraternal peace in the Connor family.
Once more the performances are brilliant, and in the case of the brothers athletically energetic. Maeliosa Stafford's Coleman has clearly been beating up on his brother since childhood, but the miserly Valerie, much given to buying plastic religious figurines, seems to have got the upper hand on him, and Brian F. O'Byrne's performance is slimily repellent. David Ganly's Father Welsh is the epitome of desolation and insecurity, while Dawn Bradfield's perkily shocking Girleen plays the field for all she is worth.
For all this black, bleak, mean spirited comedy of violence and mayhem, Francis O'Connor has provided a suitably dark setting in which three miserable dwellings are wrapped by a towering dark blue background, the whole well lit by Ben Ormerod. The sound is excellently modulated by Bell Helicopter and Paddy Cunneen's music echoes every mournful threat of the text without ever impeding the comedy. The stage crew get through a prodigious amount of work with skill and efficiency.
For good reason, the whole production - jointly for the Druid Theatre and the Royal Court Theatre - received a rapturous standing ovation in Galway on Saturday night.