MURDEROUS LAUGHTER

AT A key point near the end of Martin McDonagh's great gothic soap opera, The Leenane Trilogy, one of the characters looks guiltily at another and says: "We shouldn't laugh." It is a simple line, but, for the audience, a devastating one. We have, at that point, spent nearly six hours laughing ourselves sick at some of the blackest, bleakest stories that have ever been told in the Irish theatre. We have laughed at the Famine, at murders and suicides, at children drowning in slurry pits and old men choking on vomit. And the question that McDonagh asks us is: when does the laughing stop and the thinking begin? For at its core, the trilogy is a comedy about the need to take some things seriously.

It is often said, with a great deal of truth, that the characteristic mode of Irish theatre is tragicomedy. And in that sense, McDonagh, for all the complexity of his background and influences, is clearly an Irish playwright. The difference, though is that whereas in the classic Irish repertoire, comedy and tragedy tend to alternate in the same play, here they become indistinguishable. These plays are so brilliantly entertaining that we are still laughing half way down the street. But because we know we shouldn't laugh, they are also deeply disturbing.

The disturbance comes from the sense of being in a world where the kind of responses implied by words like comedy and tragedy just don't work anymore. It is not accidental that the Ireland of these plays is one in which all authority has collapsed. The family, from The Beauty Queen of Leenane onwards, is a site for psychological and even biological warfare. The law, in the shape of Garda Tom Hanlon (Brian F. O'Byrne) in A Skull in Connemara, is a joke, and everyone is literally getting away with murder. The Church, embodied by David Ganly's Father Welsh in The Lonesome West is a lost, despairing young alcoholic, whose flock console him with the thought that at least he is not a paedophile. The Catholic Church's great point, says Maeliosa Stafford's Coleman Connor in the same play, is the ability to supply good vol au vents at funerals.

This is a world where the difference between the real and the unreal is increasingly hard to grasp. On the one hand there is a sense of isolated people clinging to a remote and inhospitable landscape. But on the other, this isolation is also suspended in the airwaves. From the start, through television and emigration, bits of other places - Australia, America, England, Trinidad - float into consciousness. And the plays themselves are plugged into the television screen - with its continual references to Australian domestic dramas, American detective series and, in The Lonesome West, to The Odd Couple, the trilogy is a giant soap opera, but one that makes Twin Peaks look like The Riordans.

AT ONE level, then, the trilogy maps a very real and immediate Ireland. However grotesque the exaggerations, they inflate a recognisable truth so that it can be seen more clearly. But at another level, the world that is imagined in this way is also a version of one of the great mythic landscapes - the world before morality. It is the ancient Greece of The Oresteia a cycle of death and revenge before the invention of justice. It is, perhaps more to the point, the wild west of John Ford's westerns or Cormac McCarthy's novels, a raw frontier beyond civilisation.

McDonagh's brilliance, though, lies in the way he drains the heroics out of the myth. He suggests that what happens when order collapses is not just the big, epic horrors, but a hysterical riot of incongruities. What makes his characters so like old, mad children is that everyone has forgotten what adults are supposed to learn the difference between what matters and what doesn't.

Much of the best of his comedy comes from the contrast between the savage intensity that the characters invest in unimportant objects - Kimberly biscuits, Tayto crisps, plastic figurines of saints - and the carelessness with which they treat each other's lives. The appalling hilarity of this contrast reaches its logical conclusion in The Lonesome West when Coleman, about to be knifed by his brother Valene, realises that his best way of defending himself is to point his shotgun, not at Valene, but at the latter's beloved new gas cooker. In this demented pre-moral world, things matter much more than lives.

If Martin McDonagh had not existed, Garry Hynes would have had to invent him, for all of this is uncannily in line with what she and Druid have been about over the last 21 years. For one thing the trilogy is the culmination of a long demythologisation of the West that she and the company have conducted through such great productions as The Playboy of the Western World, M.J. Molloy's The Wood of the Whispering and Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire and Conversations on a Homecoming. At a profound level, McDonagh's plays represent a final reversal of Romanticism. To the Romantics, the West was proof of the Utopian belief that life was better and purer before the imposition of modern society. Here, the West, without a functioning society, proves the opposite.

The plays fit in with Garry Hynes's work at Druid in another way, too. The company's veterans - Marie Mullen, Maeliosa Stafford, Mick Lally - have often been at their very best when exploding naturalism from within, starting with the apparently familiar and making it very strange.

This is precisely the way McDonagh's writing operates. It takes the conventions of kitchen sink drama and exaggerates them into a kind of dirty naturalism. As Hynes has done so often, it takes the elements of literary western speech and writes them out with the kind of florescent pens that Maryjohnny Rafferty in A Skull in Connemara uses for doing bingo. For these people not only talk they talk about talk, discussing curses, insinuations, aspersions, insults, and coinages: "There's no such word as unbare." They have a theatrical self consciousness that has been the hallmark of so much of Druid's work.

This confluence of Druid's history with McDonagh's intentions makes for a magnificently seamless production in which play and players are inseparable. There are great technical achievements - the simplicity which designer Francis O'Connor's distils from a very complex use of space, the odd grandeur of Ben Ormerod's lighting, the flawless pacing and relentless physicality of Hynes's direction.

But this is above all a triumph in the direction of actors. The sheer facility of McDonagh's writing for the stage is such that it would be difficult to imagine an entirely bad production. But an entirely good one is a ferocious challenge for it requires an ability to maintain a highly distinctive tone over three plays.

MCDONAGH'S style is not quite like anything else on earth. The characters are cartoon creatures who really die when someone fires a shotgun at their heads. They are sitcom people in desperate situations and horrific comedies. They are puppets who continue to move around long after the strings of logical control have been cut. To inhabit them, the actors have to both believe in them utterly and yet maintain the kind of cool distance they would bring to a farce or a knockabout silent movie.

They do it - collectively and almost perfectly. Brian F. O'Byrne's achievement in creating three different characters with the same accent and the same age who are yet utterly different is the most remarkable. But there are brilliant performances, too, from Anna Manahan, Marie Mullen and Maeliosa Stafford, and all the acting is extraordinarily intelligent.

The result is undoubtedly one of the great events of the contemporary Irish theatre. It would be greater if Martin McDonagh had managed to find, in his exploration of a world that has imploded, some basis for the new morality he seems to be seeking, some ground for reconciliation. But given that he has not yet found it, there is something deeply admirable in the way he refuses to concoct it merely for the sake of completeness. The openness of his ending suggests that he is still on a journey and the exhilaration of this strange stretch of the road suggests that anyone who travels it will want to go all the way with him.