Gothic, Macabre, Hollow: A Very Very Very Dark Matter At Bridge Theatre

A Very Very Very Dark Matter, Bridge Theatre ★★☆☆☆

By Neil Dowden Last edited 65 months ago

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Gothic, Macabre, Hollow: A Very Very Very Dark Matter At Bridge Theatre A Very Very Very Dark Matter, Bridge Theatre 2
Theatre Review: A Very Very Very Dark Matter At Bridge Theatre
Photo: Manuel Harlan

After huge success with his last play Hangmen, Martin McDonagh appears to have lost the plot with his new black comedy. A Very Very Very Dark Matter is a twisted fairy tale about Hans Christian Andersen that reveals his guilty secret and the hypocrisy of his time. Yet its surreal strangeness feels forced and self-indulgent.

It seems the fêted children’s writer Andersen keeps imprisoned in a box in the attic of his Copenhagen townhouse a Congolese pygmy woman who actually writes his stories. What’s more, it turns out the woman’s sister has done the same for Charles Dickens in London. Of course, this bizarre fantasy is not supposed to be taken at face value – it’s a metaphor for 19th-century colonial exploitation, specifically the Belgian King Leopold II’s atrocities in the Congo.

Photo: Manuel Harlan

However, linking this appalling repression to literary plagiarism – or taking control of the narrative – is unconvincing. There are very funny moments, especially a scene in the Dickens’ household when they are trying to get rid of their overstaying guest Andersen, which subverts Victorian family decorum with obscene insults. But at the heart of this piece of magical realist storytelling is not so much darkness as hollowness.

Photo: Manuel Harlan

Matthew Dunster’s production has a gothic, macabre atmosphere, boosted by Anna Fleischle’s spooky attic set with shadowy marionettes hanging from rafters.

Jim Broadbent plays Andersen as an egotistical, potty-mouthed man-child who makes racist jokes. Johnetta Eula’Mae Ackles gives the prisoner he has named ‘Marjory’ a sassily independent presence. And Phil Daniels is an amusingly coarse, bad-tempered Dickens with a skeleton in his cupboard.

Photo: Manuel Harlan

A Very Very Very Dark Matter, Bridge Theatre, 3 Potters Fields Park, SE1 2SG. Tickets £15–£65, until 6 January 2019.

Last Updated 26 October 2018