By the time the lights fade on the final scene of the Bridge Theatre‘s production of what one must assume is the unrevised first draft of Martin McDonagh‘s very very very uneven new play A Very Very Very Dark Matter, you’ll have long since figured out that the tagline on the poster is absolutely accurate: this is no fairytale, despite the fact that Hans Christian Andersen is the central character. We may first see Jim Broadbent’s preening, vainglorious Hans concluding a reading of The Little Mermaid, but McDonagh – as you’d expect – very quickly moves into less familiar territory. What follows is a breathless, bumpy ride through a plot that struggles to spin Andersen’s infamous five-week visit to Charles Dickens into a fable which attempts to connect a dissection of colonial atrocities in Victorian Africa with a meditation on the way fairytales spring from the darker side of our subconscious, via a recurring discussion of the dominance of the white male, both in the history of published fiction, and in history itself. There’s also a bit of time travel thrown in, and a scene with Charles Dickens’s very sweary children, and grizzled prerecorded narration by Tom Waits.
At the centre of McDonagh’s studiedly-outrageous plot is Marjory, the “Congolese pygmy woman” Andersen supposedly keeps locked up in a three-foot-high mahogany box in his Copenhagen attic, and who we’re told writes Andersen’s stories in return for sausages he pokes through a hole in the box’s front window (no, actual sausages, you have a filthy mind). Andersen takes Marjory’s characters and whitewashes them, removing any details that identify them as black, and then passes them off as his own; it’s a passable enough metaphor for the way European countries treated their colonies, although you’ll get a more nuanced discussion of the way the white cultural hegemony bleaches the black out of black culture across London at Dreamgirls at the Savoy, but here it’s buried in the middle of a narrative that seems to keep throwing things at the stage in the hope that a few of them will eventually stick. That might be OK if McDonagh managed to bring everything together into a coherent whole, but he doesn’t. The overall impression is of watching a stack of ideas circling a point but never quite landing on it.
It does manage to hold your attention, though, and there are some genuine laughs, although the play’s comedic voice is sometimes problematic. Broadbent brings just the right amount of twinkle to his nastily self-absorbed Hans, and wrings all the laughs he can out of the script. Phil Daniels’s Sweary Charles Dickens is a joy, and so is Elizabeth Berrington’s even swearier Mrs. Dickens. As Marjory, Johnetta Eula’Mae Ackles gives a tremendously dignified performance in a role that should be a bigger gift to an actor than it is here. Too often, McDonagh falls back on having Andersen make (frankly racist) jokes at Marjory’s expense; there’s a fine line between exposing stereotypes and simply parroting them, and McDonagh comes perilously close to finding himself on the wrong side of it. There’s a cosiness, too, to his discussion of white dominance – yes, there are still statues of King Leopold all over Belgium despite the atrocities his soldiers committed in the Congo, but that fact floats by in the middle of a stream of one-liners and comic business and other ideas, and it doesn’t land the way it was probably meant to.
Worse, there are several moments where we’re clearly supposed to laugh at some aspect of Andersen’s treatment of Marjory, and watching a tall, relatively strong, relatively well-off white man mistreat a short, physically-handicapped black woman (Marjory has only one foot, Andersen having apparently – we’re told – amputated the other one in return for once letting her out of her box) simply isn’t funny, although that didn’t stop some people laughing. It’s OK for comedy to get dark, and to take on complicated moral territory – it’s more than OK, black comedy and gallows humour can be tremendously effective weapons when deployed effectively – but to pull it off successfully you need to make the audience start to question why they laughed, and there needs to be a reason for the laugh that extends beyond the comedy of cruelty. I don’t know whether the problem here is McDonagh’s messy script or Matthew Dunster’s production, which feels slack-paced even though the play is only about 80 minutes long, but the play’s overall tone is comfortable, in a way that sits very uneasily against the subject matter, which makes the laughs that come at Marjory’s expense wince-inducing for those among the audience who aren’t joining in.
There’s far more edge in Anna Fleischle’s fabulously macabre set design – an attic with dozens of creepy-looking puppets hanging from the rafters – than in the writing, which is never as clever or as dangerous as it thinks it is, or as it needs to be. Broadbent is always good value, and he’s worth the cost of the ticket (so are Daniels and Berrington), but the character McDonagh gives him doesn’t stretch him; in the haunted look in his eyes as the lights fade at the end of the final scene there’s a glimpse of the much more interesting play this could have been if McDonagh hadn’t (uncharacteristically) consistently privileged easy laughs over intellectual depth. There’s enough in the performances, and enough humour that works, that it’s difficult to have a very very very bad time watching A Very Very Very Dark Matter, but this is, unfortunately, a very very VERY bad play, and it needn’t have been. McDonagh seems to be coasting on his reputation here: somebody should have sent him back to take another pass at his script, or preferably about twenty other passes at his script, but I suppose it’s difficult to make someone whose awards and nominations have their own Wikipedia page go back and revise substandard work if they aren’t inclined to do it off their own bat. The result, unfortunately, is a play that never once hits hard enough: watching it is rather like being promised Tramadol and then getting an aspirin.
Saving the word, one apostrophe at a time. 