Enda Walsh can seem at times like the third McDonagh brother. Like them, he’s a regular purveyor of the blackly comic interspersed with explosive bouts of violence.
But unlike the London-raised McDonaghs, the Irish don’t consider Walsh a fraud. And he isn’t: quite apart from his national bona fides, Walsh is a substantial playwright, capable of being both flinty and poetic. One only has to compare his monologue for Michael Fassbender in Hunger to the McDonaghs’ overwritten, self-congratulatory work in films like Calvary or In Bruges.
Which makes Misterman all the more disappointing. A one-man show performed by Cillian Murphy to raves in New York and London, it’s a play that feels like a McDonagh B-side. Set in a small rural town, with a nutter protagonist aggrieved at the world and who inevitably visits bloody retribution upon it, Misterman could be a sequel to The Leenane Trilogy.
The play’s protagonist, Thomas Magill, is meant to be occupying an unidentified industrial site, perhaps a derelict factory, on the outskirts of the town of Inishfree. In New York and London, the play was staged in cavernous spaces (St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, the National in London). Murphy was ranged against a vast, empty space – a sense of one man in an eternal void impossible to duplicate in the tiny Old Fitz.
Thomas Campbell is entirely credible in the lead role, but the space – full of old cans and tape players, on which disembodied voices loop – is disorienting in its indistinctness. Adding to the confusion are Campbell’s conversations with the edited voices, clearly much practiced: townsfolk we never see but only hear, and often difficult to distinguish from each other. Kate Gaul’s production is hard to fault and Campbell’s performance strong if a bit studied, but the whole thing feels airless, and the bloodbath it culminates in all too predictable.
2.5/5 stars
Misterman is playing at the Old Fitz Theatre until Saturday June 27.
