A Very Very Very Dark Matter explained

What on earth is A Very Very Very Dark Matter about?

I have loved everything by Martin McDonagh I have seen so far, in order: The Beauty Queen of Leenane (at Young Vic), In Bruges, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. All this created high hopes for McDonagh's new play, at the nearly-new Bridge Theatre on the south bank of the Thames near Tower Bridge in London. However, I walked out of the play completely flummoxed: I'd watched ninety minutes of a racist childrens' writer and a foul-mouthed novelist and couldn't understand what it was all for.

In my bafflement I pleaded with a member of the bar staff, "Have you seen the play? What on earth links Hans Christian Anderson and the Belgian massacre in the Congo?"

She told me that she had no clue either. I suspect she just wanted me to work it out for myself. Perhaps Martin has told everyone at the Bridge not to give the punters an easy way out.

After a couple of nights sleeping on it: here's what I think it's about:

Hegemony

The play is about the lasting effect of colonialism, and western economic and military dominance generally, on arts and culture.

The narrative focuses on Hans Christian Anderson, and to a lesser extent Charles Dickens. They are two celebrated writers, still widely read 150 years later. This is because they were great writers, which is widely acknowledged, but also because they lived in powerful rich western nations, which is perhaps less acknowledged.

The could have been other, just as talented, artists living elsewhere but they did not, and do not now, enjoy the same success and exposure as Anderson and Dickens. For example, the greatest author at the time might have been a Pygmy woman living in the Congo. Hans Christian Anderson did not literally steal his work from a Congolese Pygmy but he might well have stolen her cultural prominence through the mechanism of Western military and economic dominance which excluded the voices of non-western artists.

The play deals in part with the genocide committed by Belgian troops in the Congo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, some eighteen years after Anderson's death. The violence and economic extraction  of those events are the obvious features of empire, but McDonagh wants to expand on that and tell us about the cultural effect of empire.

History is written by the victors. McDonagh is telling us that the victor also gets to dominate arts and culture. To take an example: India's most prominent artistic symbol, the Taj Mahal, was created, and is a lasting monument to an oppressive colonial regime*.

In the real world, ghosts go unheeded

Anderson's racism and dismissiveness of the true author reflects the general attitude of entitlement of the rich west to the cultural centre-stage. He is deliberately ludicrous: McDonagh lampoons his, and by extension, the West's outrageous divisiveness of the rest of the world, and its creative output. Anderson has a similar function to  Sacha Baron-Cohen's absurd Borat when he is used to ridicule anti-semites.

Anderson sees apparitions of Belgian soldiers. This mirrors Scrooge's dreams in A Christmas Carol (neatly by Dickens) and there are three time periods in the story: the first act, the second act ten years later, and the massacre eighteen years after that representing a horrific, avoidable future. The killing of ten million people is a gruesome real-world amplification of Christmas Yet To Come. Unlike Scrooge, and despite the far greater evil, Anderson does not repent. As a result, 'Marjory' must take up arms to resist her oppressors.

McDonagh is making a point about the tragic difference between morality tales (neatly by both authors) and real life. In the real world, people fail to repent, mistakes are repeated infinitely and real suffering is the result.

Controlling the means of production

The Belgians took the hands of people in the Congo to punish them for not producing sufficient rubber. This has symbolic resonance as hands are often the means of artistic production as well. There is a myth that the hands of workers who created the Taj Mahal had their hands cut off to stop them producing anything as beautiful again: the coloniser is able both to project his own culture and then throttle the culture of others.

The heavy symbolism continues as 'Marjory' receives a machine gun hidden inside an accordion to fight the oppressive soldiers. This blunt instrument** of a prop-metaphor has an artistic instrument literally being used as a weapon***. Amidst global power-struggles, a medium of entertainment becomes a tool of violence. The gun is given to her by another marginalised group: 'gypsies'. Perhaps McDonagh is suggesting that oppressed groups can work together against Western cultural hegemony.

Rhodes must fall, but that must only be the start

The play ends by telling us about the statues of King Leopold II in Belgium. This is an example of a western nation's continued unwillingness to discuss the negative impacts of empire, and doing so through the use of art and cultural symbolism. Tearing down some statues is clearly not enough but it might be a good start. If we can start to reject the permanence of imperial left-overs and make our own decisions about the cultural landscape, perhaps we can do so from a more enlightened and inclusive viewpoint.



* I am aware that this doesn't fit the West-as-oppressor theme but a) it's a neat image, b) there have been plenty of non-western empires and it seems narrow-minded to ignore that, and c) I wanted it to work with the call-back later on.

** ;)

*** I wrote this before reading any of the reviews for the play. I wanted to form my own opinion. As I result, I missed the even more obvious prop joke. Michael Billington in the Guardian notes that Charles Dickens has a LITERAL SKELETON IN HIS CLOSET. Facepalm.