Review: Misterman

Misterman (at the National Theatre until 28 May) starts sweetly enough. Cillian Murphy (star of Solar, 28 Days Later) rattles manically round a disused warehouse which is decked out with strip lighting, bare bulbs, junk. Doris Day sings “Everybody Loves a Lover,” creamily soft, like a pat of butter. There’s a bit of physical comedy: he can’t turn the tape off!

OK, maybe this man-child is just a little too exuberant. Whoa – and really sloppy with his props. Violent, even. Things get thrown about the place; later, as Misterman Thomas Magill reenacts conversations with his fellow townsfolk, there’s an unhinged carelessness to the way he pours tea, which splashes over furniture and floor.

Writer Enda Walsh takes your Irish dinky pastoral and smashes it to bits. The smithereens mosaic into something altogether harder and harsher. In your face, Ballykissangel.

This garage-space is full of reel-to-reel tapes (Beckett fans will note the debt to Krapp’s Last Tape), which Thomas uses to play the other half of conversations and the FX of daily life, and especially a barking dog, recorded in his hometown of Innisfree. He cues in the sounds and voices, corrects himself (sometimes the tape corrects him). The show that Thomas is putting on is clearly a long time in rehearsal. We gradually understand that he will be rehearsing these scenes, which all relate to a single day, for a long time to come. The debris filling the garage could be the jumble in his own head: areas (like the cluster of crucifixes) light up as though neural pathways have been activated.

The populace of Innisfree (Murphy broadens his accents and acting style to do “types”) are a banal and self-interested lot, who struggle to talk of anything beyond the commonplace. With that special Irish ear for the surreally comic in the everyday, Walsh has them make statements like, “there’s a great honesty to the milk of magnesia”.

Murphy’s voice has the piping squeak of a breaking one; his clothes are ill-fitting and filthy. The film star jawline and head have sprouted hair – just those charged blue eyes laser right to the back of the stalls. He’s tested to his limits in impersonating the town’s inhabitants, and miming encounters with them. He has fights with invisible assailants, or uses props for people: unnervingly his “Mammy,” whose back he’s massaging with Vick’s, is a table. His is a performance that burns with zeal.

Thomas, who is “touched” (but not necessarily by the divine), senses that there is something beyond all this. He has visions, walks with angels, feels God’s immanence. He’s God’s conduit and recording angel, with a tape deck slung round his neck. One neighbour shows “immodesty”. Another is “indecent”. “Fuck you and your fucking words,” says one, to Thomas. But his own language is as restricted as theirs: it’s a schoolboy catechism that he spouts, and a pollyanna Garden of Eden he seeks, where apples “pop into life”.

From Genesis we hurtle to Revelations, and from recording to avenging angel. His brutal encounter with the Roger the dog – the tale could have been rewritten as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Daytime – prefigures a still more savage act of retribution. The soundscape collapses in on itself – Doris Day’s buttered tones surface again, then are supplanted by a mangled Toploader (“Dancing in the Moonlight”) at the local community centre dance.

Here Thomas straps on a pair of wings, spits bile at the townsfolk/us, and confesses his dark deeds from the gantry. Murphy takes his lunacy up a notch.

Misterman’s not easy listening, or watching. There are periods where an andante lyricism stalls to largo. At others it’s a little like being repeatedly lashed with rosary beads. The play’s perhaps too fixed on inter-textual chat with Beckett and Yeats to speak very clearly to us. It also places enormous stress on Cillian Murphy, the lone performer; a lesser man would have lost us.