Four years ago, Irish playwright David Ireland was virtually run out of Edinburgh after toxic reviews for his staggeringly offensive play ‘I Promise You Sex and Violence’.
The intervening time has seen him largely rehabilitated, however, with the considerably more likeable ‘The End of Hope‘ and ‘Cyprus Avenue’ earning him strong notices (the latter at London‘s temple of wokeness the Royal Court).
So he‘s finally back at the Fringe, and look: ‘Ulster American’ is a palpably more sophisticated work than ‘…Sex and Violence’. It has a lot of smart stuff to say about toxic masculinity, masculine hypocrisy, English colonialist attitudes towards Northern Ireland, and American cultural appropriation of Irish identity. And there’s an amusing bit about how terrible theatre critics are.
Nonetheless, large chunks of it are based around uninhibited Hollywood star Jay (Darrell D’Silva) and English theatre director Leigh (Robert Jack) having a long conversation about which women they’d rape if they had to. That they know it’s unacceptable, that Robert is notionally horrified by the whole thing, that the sequence is there to expose the men’s essential misogyny, is not, I’d argue, particularly relevant. Whatever the deeper ‘meaning’ of the rape chats, their purpose is to make the audience laugh: they’re big, showy offy comedy routines, engineered to make us chuckle about rape – even in an aghast way – for a long period of time.
Many of the audience laughed along uproariously at Gareth Nicholls’s production, and even ovated at the end, but I just found it grim, and if that makes me some sort of snowflake or whatever then it’s a hill I’m pretty comfortable dying on.
The frustration is that if the sequence had been handled with more care – ie just not so obviously mining for laughs – then ‘Ulster American’ would have been the clear highlight of the Traverse 2 programme. De Silva is fantastic as a space cadet Irish-American Oscar-winner, who falls to Earth with a catastrophic bump when the play’s no bullshit writer Ruth (Lucianne McEvoy) explains to him the difference between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland – something that had hitherto eluded him. The humour is, for the most part, bracing and mercilessly funny (though it’s a bit distracting how the climactic scene seems to hinge on a wilful misunderstanding of how Twitter works).
‘Ulster American’ is a good comedy, except when it’s a vile comedy. It wasn’t discussion of rape that bothered me – it was the grandstanding for laughs, and the fact it was susccessful. I am sure Ireland could mount an articulate explanation of why it’s all justified, but equally I would image he would be disappointed if he didn’t offend anybody – and gentle reader, I was offended.
