The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh, directed by Görkem Acaroglu. Design by Emma Kingsbury, lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis, sound design by Ben Grant, music arranged and performed by Caitlin French. With Luke Elliot, Ben Grant, Mark Treginning and Gemma Falk. Tiny Dynamite Theatre @ Theatreworks until September 21.

The Time Is Not Yet Ripe by Louis Esson, directed by Jane Woollard. Design and set painting by Amanda Johnson, lighting design by Bronwyn Pringle. With Kurt Geyer, Ming Zhu-Hii. David Adamson, Don Bridges, Melanie Beddie, Tom Wren, Grant Cartwright, Georgina Capper, Sharon Davis and Mike McEvoy. Here Theatre and La Mama @ the Carlton Courthouse until September 14.

There is an interesting, if elliptical, continuity between these two vastly different plays. One, Martin McDonagh's The Lonesome West, was written in the late 1990s in Ireland; the other, Louis Esson's The Time Is Not Yet Ripe, a hundred years earlier in Australia. Both are black comedies which in different ways satirise the social and historical emptiness of a colonised culture.

There are parallels, as well as illuminating differences, between Ireland and Australia, even if they are rather more interesting than those outlined by The Lonesome West director Görkem Acaroglu in the program. (Acaroglu wins the prize for fatuous program notes for pointing out that "Ireland, like Australia, is an island surrounded by water. The Irish and the Australian's (sic) love travelling. Yet Australians, unlike the Irish, also suffer from the tyranny of their distance. The distance creates loneliness...a feeling of imprisonment, and often yearning and despair.")


Perhaps it's unfair to begin by criticising a program note; or it would be if the cliches expressed here weren't reflected in the production. Despite a couple of bravura performances from Luke Elliot and Ben Grant, McDonagh's play deserves a little more directorial sharpness: the production gives a sense that emotional complexities are here simplified, going for an easier, more clownish humour than the tragic comedy the writing aspires towards.

It's hard not to feel that Acaroglu might have been better off following up the common historical themes of colonisation and its legacies of concealed violence - the corpse in the attic about which everyone knows and nobody talks - and the cultural and personal amnesia that follows. As well as that sense of no-place - the conviction that life goes on elsewhere more richly and fully and meaningfully - that sucks the vitality out of any engagement with the present. This sense of displacement is, with its twin emotion, parochialism, the defining nostalgia of the colonised mind.

Certainly, McDonagh's black comedy, the final instalment of the Leenane trilogy he wrote in the 1990s, examines a kind of hell in which people are so brutalised they no longer recognise the realities of their own feelings. The Irish town Leenane becomes bleak portrait of contemporary Ireland, a consciously brutal counter-argument to the sentimentalised view of the land of poetically melancholic peasants larking about with shamrocks in quaint pubs.

A four character play like The Beauty Queen of Leenane (and Sam Shepard's True West, with which this play bears some affinities), The Lonesome West concerns two brothers, Valene (Luke Elliot) and Coleman (Ben Grant), whose sibling relationship is defined by vicious rivalry. Valene is a miser of Gogolian proportions, who conceals his hoarded poteen in a biscuit tin sealed by (re-used) tape and marks all his possessions, including his cherished collection of plastic Virgin Marys, with his initial. His violent brother Coleman has just murdered their father with a shotgun, and in order to prevent Valene going to the police has signed over the house to his brother.

The two characters who dream of something better are the young alcoholic priest Father Welsh (Mark Tregonning) and the foul-mouthed but innocent schoolgirl Girleen (Gemma Falk). Welsh is so ineffectual in his attempts to reform the village ("the murder capital of Europe") that no one gets his name right. Predictably enough, these two fail to survive the village - one drowns himself and the other goes mad. But it's a moot point whether the brothers have survived either: the worst, one senses, has already happened to both of them, and the long trail of mutual crimes between them is itself the result of unhealable damage.

How this play might situate itself in an Irish history marked by centuries of political violence and British occupation is beyond the scope of this review, but my bet is on a strong connection. It's probably worth pointing here to an essay I read recently about the early 20th century Irish revolutionary Ernie O'Malley, who has been heavily criticised as callous and unfeeling for his indifference to his brother's death. The Irish post-colonialist David Lloyd comments:

[O'Malley] writes with considerable cultural as well as personal insight in a long—and invaluable—auto-biographical letter from prison... about his middle-class Irish family and its inability to foster loving relations: “There was very little love in the family. I can honestly say that I never loved my parents, but I respected them.” Home life, he explains, “was none too congenial as its ties were never strong enough.” The sense of lack of affect is hardly unique to the O’Malley (or Malley) family in the Ireland of the time or for many generations since, and it would be valuable to have further study of the ways in which the intersection of Victorian values and colonial culture may have impacted the “structures of feeling” in Ireland at the time of the revolution.

This production aims for a sense of Irish authenticity, emphasised by the fiddler who plays Irish folk airs between or, at certain moments of emotional heightening, beneath the scenes. Given McDonagh's dialogue is written in Irish brogue, it would be difficult to perform without accents, but the violin blurs the anti-romanticising of the play (a broken fiddle might have been more appropriate). And it's certainly performed with energy and brio, bringing out the slapstick comedy between the warring brothers, if without a tragic sting. What emerges is a creditable but strangely underwhelming production.

The Time Is Not Yet Ripe is, on the other hand, a colonial oddity, like the paintings of misshapen kangaroos and oak-like gum trees that dot our galleries. Like the national argument about becoming a Republic - which, as Robert Hughes sardonically points out, has been hotly debated since the 1850s without our ever leaving the Monarchy - it demonstrates how Australian cultural amnesia results in a constant cycle of repetition. Perhaps the real (if somewhat depressing) virtue of this play is its demonstration of how little has changed in our mainstream cultural discourse. Even as things shift under the skin, the same repressive responses rise to counter them.

Esson's political satire was first performed in 1912 - five years before the October Revolution in Russia, two years before the outbreak of World War 1. Edwardian England was rife with new political ideas - a mood of public anti-Imperialism driven by the Second Boer War had seen the Liberals elected in a landslide, with Labour holding the balance of power.

Reading the literature of the time, it's fascinating to see how many preoccupations Edwardians had in common with us - feminism, republicanism, the endless question of national identity recur again and again. But with a few signal differences - the 20th century revolutions of Fascism and Socialism brought modern totalitarianism into being and left millions of corpses in their wake. Utopian belief is much harder to sustain in the 21st century than it was in 1900. And the political struggles of Indigenous people in Africa, Asia, America and here scarcely registered on the European map in Esson's time. Politics was a white man's burden.

Esson reflected the general European conviction that Australia was a "prose dull land" bereft of poetry (our first poet, the superbly named Barron Field, lamented Australia was "where Nature is prosaic, / Unpicturesque, unmusical, and where / Nature-reflecting Art is not yet born.") Esson the social satirist portrays a colonial society in which the present of elsewhere repeats itself here as farce, and in which a leaden inanition mitigates against change.

The occasion for the play is an election, where the Prime Minister Sir Joseph Quivington (Kurt Geyer) is defending his conservative government. The action revolves around two characters in rivalry for the same seat - Quivington's daughter Doris (Ming Zhu Hii), who represents a Woman's temperance party, and her fiance Sydney Barrett (Grant Cartwright), who is standing for the Socialists. Both represent repressive extremes at odds with The People, but in the end Woman wins with her mission to make politics, and everything else, more polite.

Jane Wollard's production takes on all the melodramatic cues, with varying degrees of success. There are a couple of wonderful theatrical conceits - Barrett's absurd speech, for example, in which he makes a call for more Egyptologists and poets, results in a stirring rendition of the Red Flag. Much of the time the artifice degenerates into shameless mugging, but there are very decent performances from Georgina Capper as the uptight Temperance activist Miss Perkins, Tom Wren as Tom K. Hill, an American investor, and Grant Cartwright.

Esson's insistence on an authentically Australian drama has made him an attractive figure in later periods of Australian theatre, but unlike, say, Oscar Wilde (whose wit this piece aspires towards) his work remains enclosed in its time. It bounces along painlessly enough, but all the same I felt sorry for the VCE students forced to believe that this play is anything more than a historical curiosity.

Picture: Luke Elliot (left) and Ben Grant in The Lonesome West. Photo: Ponch Hawkes