Members of a residents association meet to discuss a piece of graffiti in Lisa Tierney-Keogh's new play. Pat Redmond
★
Lana Del Rey’s urgent doomy opera Norman Fucking Rockwell! came out the same week as the Abbey Theatre’s new play This Beautiful Village, and it serves as an interesting soundtrack.
The record opens on a relationship with a male artist, self-important and immature, who Del Rey ultimately rejects. As an act of revenge, he composes a poem immortalising her as a killjoy, a petty gesture which she uses as an angelic leap for her chorus: “Your head in your hands / As you colour me blue”. A hateful man’s aggression is drowned out by a woman’s transcendence, soaring in baroque piano and strings.
This Beautiful Village also features a frustrated male artist, a scriptwriter named Paul (Aidan McArdle). He is one member of a residents association gathered in a leafy Dublin suburb to discuss a piece of graffiti installed outside Liz’s home (Ruth Bradley). She believes it’s a hate message for her wife: “Jessica is a filthy fucking slut”.
Early signs of the group’s divisions arise, comically enough, when a man tiptoeing around women’s issues (Damien Kearney) accidentally breaks a sculpture depicting a vagina. “I didn’t know what it was,” he says, badly informed. “It was just a vagina,” says Liz without alarm. “It was an ugly old yoke,” says Pom Boyd’s conservative Maggie, who, in between plot points delivers one-liners.
Most of the group agree they should paint over the graffiti but Liz argues that the inscription should be kept visible. It’s an opportunity to invite schoolchildren to discuss inappropriate behaviour towards women. The suggestion lights up an argument about misogyny that squawks as harshly as a panel debate on a current affairs programme.
There aren’t any racist people living around here, says a white woman to a black woman. Feminism is what’s eroding contemporary masculinity, says the man getting drunk. A health food guru interrupts debate, fishing for complements for his homemade lasagne.
Playwright Lisa Tierney-Keogh has exchanged the turn-of-century monologue form of her past play, Four Last Things, for something noticeably more transatlantic. Ciaran Bagnall’s vast set, with its central couch and coffee table, could be from one of those American living room plays written after Edward Albee and A.R. Gurney. Even the opening scene of director David Horan’s production borrows from the dark comedy television show Weeds, taking a drag on Americana.
The group all turn to address its most problematic member, Paul, whose argument-for-the-sake-of-argument strips away to a laughable performance of male entitlement. “I’m not a misogynist,” he says, arguing that boys should be allowed to call women sluts. As the association’s treasurer, he has spent everyone’s money for personal gain. As an artist, he loathes seeing women taking more projects. The play really leaves no doubt: he’s not a stand up guy.
There are far more complex shades in Michael Ford-Fitzgerald’s Dara, who arrives with the mung bean wellness and chinos of one of the Happy Pear, but lets slip his messiah complex to save all womankind. He’s a more interesting man-child to deal with.
With greater stings this might make good satire, playing up the privilege of this middle-class world. But taking it seriously, as if it were an eye-opening intervention, is so simplistic. The patriarchy can be dismantled over wine and crackers. A long-arc metaphor involving someone squatting a fly suggests a historic victory.
When a photo of the graffiti vandal surfaces, it steers debate towards racism and profiling. Tierney-Keogh leaves it to Grace (Bethan Mary-James), a black doctor, and the play’s obvious conscience, to quieten the room with a speech about evolving the culture. That’s interesting to hear at a time when theatre itself is transforming, committing to gender balance and allowing for more feminist plays. But there must be more profound ways of drowning out a man child.
Runs until Sep 14.
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