Neil LaBute’s theatre usually involves presenting us with seemingly ordinary situations that swiftly enough end up having a very dark underbelly. His dramas invariably confront audiences with deeply disturbing and complex moral dilemmas; ostensibly quotidian situations become examples of extreme behaviour. The two short plays here by LaBute – Union Square and Helter Skelter – invigoratingly remain true to type as far as the Michigan-born playwright’s obsessions are concerned.
Union Square pops up first. Dermot Magennis excellently distils the quiet desperation of a blue-collar man who has wandered to New York City with the very definite aim of tracking down his wife who has left him to ‘find herself’. Carrying a McDonald’s lunch bag under his arm the man proceeds to unload his recent troubles to a silent hobo begging on the street. He does so, not by always directly addressing the audience, but mixing his address up with glances downwards to his listening hobo sitting in the street, positioned in typically humble mendicant position. Thus the audience both is and is not the hobo. We are complicit in, yet also witnesses to, what will transpire.
Union Square is a snapshot study of desperation and of a man who, contrary to appearances, has been driven to despair. The man’s friendly demeanour hides his inability to understand complexity and exposes a reluctance to relinquish control.
Stewart Roche’s confident and knowing direction allows Dermot Magennis to pace his lines with an adroit amount of intensity and spacing. Likewise, in the companion piece, Helter Skelter, the actors’ delivery is neither rushed nor panicked. Thus the real menace in what they say is never diluted by too much haste. Roche’s knowledgeable direction lends the actors the extra conviction and assurance they need to carry off their characters’ extreme dilemmas.
The man in Union Square accepts what he is going to do. He makes no excuses. In stark contrast, Les Martin’s character in Helter Skelter squirms and shuffles around the transgression and betrayal he has committed. Olga Wehrly is excellent as his pregnant wife who both finds him out and sees through his pathetic attempts to downplay the irrevocable damage he’s done and his even more vain efforts to pretend that he really does regret what has happened. Deliberately on the part of LaBute, we’re never really convinced that the husband in Helter Skelter truly understands how catastrophic his betrayal is.
In Helter Skelter, in particular, LaBute highlights the paucity of moral fortitude in the husband’s lame, half-hearted remorse. Olga Wehrly’s character makes reference to the Greek stories of old and their extremities – a theme LaBute explored more intricately and intimately in an earlier play, Bash. Here, though, the point is that the dispassion and lack of depth in modern life, the veneer of politeness and respectability it brings to everything, fails to give expression to what we endure. It is for this reason – and to make it clear to her nonsense-spouting husband that there has to be a consequence for his actions that does justice to how deeply she feels – that the wife in Helter Skelter resorts to something shocking and yet, paradoxically, wholly appropriate.
To the great credit of all involved, the fashion by which these two hard-hitting short plays seduce an audience into the banality of the ordinary only to subsequently subvert that seduction in a compelling and repelling expiation is rivetingly rendered here.
Patrick Brennan was chief theatre critic and arts writer with The Irish Examiner from 1990-2004. He is currently writing a book on the theatre of Tom Murphy.