I know I'm not alone in sometimes questioning the authenticity of Martin McDonagh's tales of small-town Irish life, but I'm a true believer now, having seen Garry Hynes's bleakly brilliant revival of McDonagh's 1997 play for Druid Theatre Company. Nicholas Hytner's National Theatre premiere played it for sympathy and laughs, but Hynes offers a darkly savage account of lives stunted in a small 1930s rural community.
For the orphaned, crippled Billy - living with his obsessional adopted aunts, who run the local store - the future is running out. When a Hollywood film company pitches up, he seizes the opportunity to escape and make his dreams come true. In a reflection on lies and truth, realities and fantasies, the face we show to the world and the heart we hide, McDonagh offers a cast of characters whose frail humanity is tested by the fictions that they weave. "Don't go romanticising it," declares village gossipmonger Johnnypateenmike when Billy, trying to discover the truth about his parents' drowning, suggests that his deformities might have been caused by his father punching his pregnant mother in the stomach.
This is a break-your-heart, cruelly funny evening directed with an exhilarating ruthlessness and acted with a bracing lack of sentimentality. Aaron Monaghan is terrific as Billy, whose lies become a truth, Dearbhla Molloy and Marie Mullen's anxious aunts seem to have stepped straight out of a Beckett play, and as Helen, the young woman who has learned to ferociously protect herself, Kerry Condon is as fierce as a polecat.
