The second in installment of The Leenane Trilogy, A Skull in Connemara, deftly combines the intensely macabre mind of Martin McDonagh with the heavily naturalistic world of this small, character-ridden Irish town.
Each year Mick Dowd (Chris Bunworth) works his way through a different part of the town cemetery, exhuming and disposing of the bones to make room for the next dead. Even sans Irish stereotypes, this alone would explain his devotion to alcohol. The news that this year he will be digging up the bones of his dead wife is almost too much. Never mind that the news comes served with local gossips, bumbling police and potentially the most annoying sidekick/antagonist written onto a stage.
This play, more so than the other two in the trilogy, combines an almost ethereal ghoulishness with small town naturalism, that makes you feel like you’re watching it take place in your Gran’s lounge room.
It lacks the focus of deeply complicated familial loathing that the other two in the trilogy are anchored on. From this, it is comparatively lighter, despite its intense plot line.
The relationships do remain a tremendous driving force, however. Mick’s relationships with Mary (Marg Downey), and Mairtin Hanlon (Tom Barton) perfectly elucidate the help and harm of the gossipy small town.
The scenes between Mick and Mary, the old bingo hopping/ liquor-sharing neighbor, were played with comic delight. Both Downey and Bunworth work such nuanced performances into these hardened characters. Bunworth plays Mick with a deep, repressed subtlety that walks the fine line of a grieving man and the man the town gossips that he may be. Whilst Downey, unsurprisingly, livens up the stage with her sharp comedic timing.
With bumbling cop Tom (Peter Reid), and his brother Mairtin, played to an impressive level of obnoxiousness, rounding out the four, there is a sense of just how stuck these characters are. With each other, with the town and with their lives as they are.
All four deftly deliver the farcical and absurd alongside the intense and twisting drama, and deliver another wonderful play by the KIN Collective.
