A ferocious and ferociously funny caricature of rural Irish
life, The Lonesome West opens with a return from a funeral.
A pair of squabbling brothers (Kevin Lewis and Stephen Holmes)
have just stuck their dad in the ground, as one of them
indelicately puts it. Dad died by gunshot wound in a hunting
accident - except that the accident, it emerges, was far
from accidental.
The craggily expressive rustic set is a kitchen decorated
with a row of cheap, devotional figurines, which one of
the odd brothers collects. A woman's magazine is the only
reading material in the family home.
Living in one another's pockets, the sexually repressed
brothers channel their energies into quarrels, insults and
petty acts of malice. Bickering eventually escalates into
murderous confrontation with shotgun and knife, accompanied
by a furious explosion of destructiveness. And, after the
cathartic violence, the brothers go off for a pint, reconciled
- until the next time.
In their mutual rivalry and reciprocal dependance, the
two feuding siblings are splendidly enacted by Holmes and
Lewis - as if they had been brothers all their lives.
On hand to interact with brothers Valene and Colman is
a well- meaning whisky priest with a crisis of faith (Mike
Coady) and a flirtatious, foul-mouthed but sentimental teenager
(Jessica Natiuk), who earns pin money by making home deliveries
of illegally distilled poteen.
Natiuk is bright, vivacious and labile in the role, with
quick shifts of mood, while Coady's priest is pathetically
vulnerable and hopelessly sincere. Within the violent domestic
comedy of relations between the two brothers is sculpted
a touching failed romance between knowing teenager and innocent
priest.
The language of the piece is colourful, to say the least.
Fecking is the commonest adjective. Action matches language.
By close of play, the offstage body count is one dad, one
dog (ears cut off and left to bleed to death), two parricides,
two suicides, and a goalkeeper hospitalised by the town's
delinquent, under-twelve, female soccer team.
Crafted by a playwright with a seriously violent and macabre
imagination, this is knockabout Irish Gothic with a vengeance,
with a little bit of Irish sentiment in the middle.
Directed by Kevin Lewis and designed by Clar Doyle, featuring
Coady as Father Welsh, Holmes as Colman, Lewis as Valene,
and Natiuk as Girleen, the Beothuck Street Players production
of Martin McDonagh's The Lonesome West continues its run
at the LSPU Hall at 8:30 p.m., closing with a Sunday matinee
at 3:00 p.m.
