A great night out with skull batterin’, to be sure

COMING TO BLOWS: In this scene from A Skull in Connemara, Mairtin (Sabian Coomber-Nickerson) is floored in a tussle with the guard (Sandy Britain), who is restrained by Mick Dowd (Ayden Malone) while Granny Maryjohnny (Liz Minogue) stands by. Picture supplied

REVIEW by Andrew McKenna

A lovely ensemble cast neatly pulls together Unity Theatre’s production of Martin McDonagh’s “A Skull in Connemara”, which to quote one of the characters is “a great night out, with drinkin’ and drivin’ and skull batterin’.”

It is a grim little tale, with much of the action taking place in the town’s overflowing graveyard, where Mick Dowd (deftly played by Ayden Malone) earns some extra cash by digging up the bones of those dead for seven years to make way for new arrivals.

The twist comes when poor Mick finds someone has made off with his wife Oona’s bones, who died seven years previously in a car accident — with Mick drunk at the wheel. He’s atoned for his crime with a prison sentence, but the local guard, or policeman, Thomas (Sandy Britain), laments the lack of real bodies in his job and how he’ll never get a promotion without a crime to solve, even if he has to invent one.

It’s a gothic and hard-hearted world. Mick’s dimwit assistant Mairtin (Sabian Coomber-Nickerson) jokes about “glassing” a girl for teasing him and how the stitches might have improved her looks. He later fiddles with the skulls, which came off as more unsavoury than funny.

Granny Maryjohnny Rafferty (Liz Minogue) likes to drift in to Mick’s cottage after a night of cheating at Bingo to cadge a drink from him and mull over her old resentments. For the children who called her names, “When I see them burned in hell, that’s when I let bygones be bygones,” she says to Mick.

The already dark little tale takes a distinct grotesque turn when Mick and Mairtin must dispose of the bones they have disinterred, all on Mick’s kitchen table amid the clutter of bottles and glasses. Here, sitting in the front row, you might want an umbrella to protect yourself from flying shards as the two gravediggers, themselves destroyed on poitin (home-brewed potato-based moonshine), ensure the bones really do return to dust.

The script felt pedestrian early on, to no fault of the cast who did a lovely job with their idiosyncratic characters, but the laughs come more thick and fast later in the show. In one scene, Mick weeps bitterly — and hilariously — about three uncles who drowned in dubious circumstances. One of them was in Boston, about which his sidekick quips, “Well at least he got to

travel”.

A Skull in Connemara is a fair slice of rural Ireland, with the cemetery’s Celtic crosses and the bare walls in Mick’s cottages minimally decorated with a crucifix, a St Brigid’s Cross and a picture of Irish radio and television presenter Eamonn Andrews.

The set, designed by director Norman Maclean, cleverly combines Mick’s home with the graveyard where he spends a lot of time digging real dirt. The set feels authentic, but even more authenticity comes from the characters’ sudden swings of temper, by one moment laughing and drinking, and the next screaming blue murder at each other, and the next weeping into their home brew about injustice and love lost. Overall it is a hoot.

Showing at Unity Theatre until Saturday June 11.