A Very Very Very Dark Matter review: Martin McDonagh’s twisted Han Christian Andersen biography is a weird blunder
There’s lots to love about Martin McDonagh, author of such universally acclaimed works as In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths, The Pillowman, and lately the Oscar-nominated Three Billboards. His newest play, A Very Very Very Dark Matter, has all the hallmarks of his weirder writing. It’s a twisted, violent and deeply ironic reimagining of the life of Hans Christian Andersen, in which the 19th century Danish author is keeping a one-legged Congolese pygmy trapped in a box in his attic, and forcing her to write his stories.
The premise is a small departure from historical fact, to say the least. Andersen was a strange man by many accounts, but Jim Broadbent plays the children’s writer as a cruel, campy buffoon desperate for fame. He is a casual racist, constantly thwarting his captive’s attempts at suicide, and barely capable of even reading his plagiarised stories out loud, stumbling over the words during a public reading of The Little Mermaid. His double-act partner is the imprisoned muse Marjory, given a stand-out performance by Johnetta Eula’Mae Ackles, whose defiant spirit in the face of grim circumstance gives us at least one character to root for.
Swimming in dark fairy tale logic, the play feels as much a part of Andersen’s own bibliography as it is a surreal biographical remix. It’s filled with the typical, twisted flourishes of the genre, the kind of cautionary nightmare fuel they used to cram into these children’s books. In one scene, Andersen agrees to allow his captive out of her tiny prison to roam around the attic, on the condition that he can make her box one inch shorter each time.
But these decorative aspects end up of no material consequence to a nonsensical plot that quickly descends into stupidity. A boorish, sweary script is written to shock, but leans into the racist jokes just a little too keenly. The wacky premise never builds to anything more than a rejected Mighty Boosh sketch, and fails to draw a line of metaphorical intent between what’s happening on stage and, who knows, colonialism? The creative process? It feels like a stretch to attach too much meaning to the flailing plot.
A Very Very Very Dark Matter is unsubtle and dumbly obscene. About as unlikely as a Congolese ghost-writer in the attic, this is a messy dud from old McDonagh.