In MiddleTown review: Leaving small-town comedy behind
Mikel Murfi breaks new ground in this play about a nomad but its meanings are vague. Photo: Agata Stoinska
Gate Truck, Dublin
★ ★
Middletown, the fictional settlement in the Gate Theatre’s new play, has some old-timey charms. It’s a place where inhabitants still make calls from pay phones, mashed potato with gravy is the eternal main course, and there aren’t many amenities beyond a butchers and grocers. The place seems so remarkably free from the chaos of the modern world, it’s surprising to hear that it’s all too clamorous for one resident. “He craved a quieter life,” says someone, observing the lone, furniture-removal man played by Mikel Murfi.
The mystery here is that one day, without explanation, Murfi’s man moves his household possessions into his truck and embarks on a new, nomadic life on the road. (Appropriately, the outdoor production tours in the Gate Truck, its cargo area meticulously transformed into a stage by designer Sabine Dargent). He prepares by sorting meaningful items from expendable clutter - a library gets narrowed down to one book, a piano gets left behind in faith of opportunities to play in cafés and bars – while some sentimental items, such as an attractive heart-shaped bell, suggest a mournfulness for the past.
It’s tempting to take this as a kind of departure for Murfi as well, whose tremendous one-man physicality created a raucous village of characters in his excellent comedy The Man in the Woman’s Shoes. Its sequel I Hear You and Rejoice offered a satisfying conclusion, though the familiarity of the formula – the economy of a solo performance without a set, the idiosyncratic portraiture of people and farm animals – ran the risk of becoming predictable. It seems wise to move on.
Where we are now is not as well defined. In the past, Murfi’s gags stuck a landing on arrival, his mimicry instantly telling you what you were looking at as he hunched over to become a physically-challenged foil or when he impeccably clucked as a chicken. Here, he presents a character in a struggle with a strange, omnipresent narrator. (“That’s too dramatic,” he yells, as the narrator impulsively blasts the cathedral intro of Orff’s epic “Carmina Burana”). The jokes are leftfield and seem wildly eccentric - watch as the man’s flushed description of life’s pleasures builds to an unexpected passion for honey, or how a philosophical realisation about the game of hurling comes from out of the blue. These details eventually form more coherent narrative points but in arriving randomly, Murfi seems to have moved onto the non sequiturs of surreal comedy.
That’s an interesting evolution but it has led to a preference for viscous ponderousness over light-footed narrative. Tantalising clues pointing to grief and a mysterious individual from the man’s past (“I could never repay her,” he says with remorse) refuse to come into sharper focus. This confusing reticence about the reason why the man is driven onto the open road makes the plot resemble less a set of circumstances befallen him than a lifestyle choice. “He is on a search for his spirit,” says the narrator.
If that sounds vague, the search doesn’t get clearer as it builds towards universal truths, the kind of wisdom printed on bumper stickers but not applied to anyone specific. These come via old romantic ideas about stripping away material constraints and living free in the wilderness, the enduring attractions of nature and its creations. The play hands these to us as comforts to be admired, even as its protagonist fades into sad oblivion.
Touring until 14th August.