Martin McDonagh- A Very Very Very Dark Matter

Martin McDonagh

A Very Very Very Dark Matter

He is at writerly ease with sociopaths. A typical McDonagh character may be set on extreme violence , or vengeance for violence, or be an intimate bystander to, or victim of, extreme violence; but they mostly all share an acceptance, if sometimes a puzzled acceptance, that this is how things are. (This is the mainspring of McDonagh’s black comedy – from plays like the Lieutenant of Innishmore, to his great films In Bruges and ThreeBillboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.)

Therefore the title of this latest play, A Very Very Very Dark Matter, doesn’t surprise. Of course, one almost yawns, a new play from McDonagh – very dark indeed. 

The only question is, which palette of dark hues will be employed. Grisly violence? Of course. A sadistic but sentimental leading character? To be sure. Nasty but comic come-uppances? Naturally. Narrative cleverness, but ultimate coherence? Hmmm…

AVVVDMhas one puzzling from beginning to end about plot and themes. The play puts two big C19 literary figures on stage – Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens – and mocks them as charlatans possessing no literary talent whatsoever, but plenty of vices and vanities. The authors (and here things very dark in all sorts of ways) have enslaved Congolese pygmy women, each of whom is wholly responsible for the literary output of her respective writer. (The pygmy dramatic conceit was first aired in an earlier play, The Pillowman. It is here moved centre stage.)

The audience sees at length the relationship, if such it is, between HCA and his pygmy (whom he has deliberately mutilated). HCA treats his pygmy as the Belgian King Leopold later treated his Congo colony – with indifferent cruelty and rapacious exploitation (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is expressly referenced as witness to the later horrors).

Dickens, whom HCA visits in a knockabout scene, has already lost his pygmy, whose skeleton he keeps, and with her his books have died too.

Time is fluid in this play – a necessity in order to yoke mid C19 Denmark with the Belgian Congo at the century’s end. HCA’s pygmy, though trapped by him, is a time traveller who, in the future, will kill a couple of Belgian colonialists attacking her village (the colonialists time travel as well, seeking pre-emptive revenge..).

HCA’s character, apart from being cruel, is a slapstick caricature of a saloon-bar bigot; Charles Dickens little better.

Whither all this? In the programme one finds learned and interesting essays by Marina Warner (on the essential twisted darkness of fairytales) and Fintan O’Toole, appraising McDonagh’s gift for storytelling, however horrible the story.

But their essays do not really map onto the play. I think the truth about AVVVDM is to be found in a scene in which HCA is going through his fan mail. One letter is from the “King of Spain”, mildly complaining about the story The Emperor’s New Clothes. As a royal sovereign himself, the King writes, he couldn’t possibly parade his “bits” through the throngs of his subjects.

Is not McDonagh to some extent having a lengthy joke at the expense of his fans? I’ll give them dark; I’ll give them grotesque; I’ll give them a savage colonial metaphor. I’ll give them something that ultimately cannot be made sense of – but, oh my, won’t they all try..

Ladies and Gentleman, I give you McDonagh’s New Play.

November 2018.