McDonagh's "Skull in Connemara,' by the Lantern (2nd review)

Act I of Martin McDonagh's A Skull in Connemara begins with a neighbor, Maryjohnny, dropping in on Mick, the local gravedigger of the hamlet of Leenane, for a chat and a nip. This encounter consumes a leisurely quarter hour, but since their relationship is neither of any particular interest nor an efficient way of communicating plot material, it's a waste of good stage time.

The rest of the act has Mick and Mairtin, his young assistant, digging up remains from the overcrowded cemetery, a fact of life in a part of the world where people have simply been dying for too long. Much drunken hilarity attends this, shared by the local constable, Thomas, a Keystone Kop type played broadly for laughs.

Is this material properly tickling your funny bone yet? If not, wait for Act II, which begins with Mick and Mairtin, now swigging from open bottles, smashing to powder the skulls and bones they've collected. This witty routine transpires for ten minutes or more, as prop dust settles in one's nostrils.

For good measure, Mick decides to take a swing at Mairtin's pate, but the latter turns just in time to forestall this blow. The two go to dispose of the remains, but Mick returns alone and bloodied. Has he in fact murdered Mairtin, and if so— the lad's general obnoxiousness and stupidity aside— why?

"'Poufs and lesbos'

While we're puzzling this question out, Maryjohnny and Thomas return. Mairtin staggers back in, his pate half staved in but otherwise seeming no worse for wear. When it's suggested to him that he might want to go the hospital (no one actually offers to assist him), Mairtin says that hospitals are just for "poufs and lesbos," and, in case the humor has escaped us, gets in a crack about female tennis players too. Mairtin's account of his injuries is that he has crashed Mick's car.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around the disappearance of the skull of Mick's late wife, which has been due to be dug up but is discovered missing. Supposedly, she'd been killed in a car crash of her own, but village rumor suspects Mick of foul play. That he's capable of it we are willing to believe on the basis of his abortive lunge at Mick and the bloodied skull the latter sports shortly after. But is he really a murderer . . .?

Frankly, my dear, I didn't give a damn. McDonagh has an ear for dialogue and dialect, but A Skull in Connemara— presented as part of a yearlong festival of contemporary Irish theater among Philadelphia theaters, and an early work of the author's— is third-rate Pinter, with third-grade humor and a dollop of Grand Guignol thrown in.

All of death's bases

The production did what it could for him. Steve Novelli, long familiar to People's Light and Theatre audiences, does his best to humanize Mick, and Jake Blouch brings a zany, manic energy to Mairtin. Jered McLenigan is a suitably pompous Thomas, and only Ellen Mulroney's Maryjohnny seems to underplay her comic opportunities.

Dirk Durossette's set— with a chimney on one side, an open grave pit on another, and headstones on the stage apron— manages to touch all death's bases at once. Directors M. Craig Getting and Kathryn MacMillan compose some striking images with the performers; nor can you blame them for the tedium, callow humor and general tastelessness of the script.

McDonagh wants to get at the underside of Irish life, but his creations seem to repel rather than engage him. This is true of Pinter too, but Pinter never mocks his characters, no matter how they abuse one another. There's a difference between art and insult.♦


To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.
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