Book Review: A Very Very Very Dark Matter

So I knew this play was going to be bleak. But sweet baby Jesus and the grown one, too. This was one hell of a dark play. Like super dark. Think Edgar Allen Poe’s poem about the heart beating under the floorboards, kinda dark, and you’re pretty much there. But with the added finery of slavery, because? Why not.

Martin McDonagh is a brilliant writer; we know this as he wrote the masterful script for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. So I knew we would be in for a real treat of truly emphatic writing that will pack a punch. ‘Three Billboards’ dealt with a cold case of a murder that has yet to be solved, the fallout and the subsequent breakdown of trust between the families and the police. ‘A Very Very Very Dark Matter’ takes the man who is essentially behind every child’s imagination, Hans Christian Andersen and pivots him into a narcissistic man-child who keeps a pygmy woman, called Mbute (Andersen calls her Marjory), locked away in a box in the attic and steals her stories. Like I said, DARK.

There are a few things to unpack here. The uncomfortable confrontation of colonialism and the slave trade is always uncomfortable to confront, and to be quite honest, if it doesn’t make you uncomfortable, then you’re doing it wrong. Go back to school and read a history book. Colonialism and slavery are uncomfortable and harsh truths in the histories of European nations, but they must and always should be confronted. Then you have the layer that the slave in question is a woman and a pygmy, meaning we have the added layer of fetishisation not only of women’s bodies, but also of a black woman at that, but also the way that McDonagh writes her as a ‘curiosity’ to Andersen. She is a ‘Thing’ and ‘Other’ or, as Andersen likes to say, ‘It’. The stories that are stolen are wrung from Mbute, down to her soul. It is to do with a lot of pain, pain from having been stolen from her home, pain at being forced into a box and pain at her life situation and the displacement of power. Andersen does not give a damn; he wants the stories because of the fame and money it brings him and what it does to his ego (like I said: narcissistic man-child), and yet, despite the cruelties, both physical and mental. He reluctantly acknowledges that he would not have any of what he has without Mbute. I do know that I have called the character of Andersen a Man-child (thank you, Sabrina Carpenter, for popularising this term), but what’s funny is that some of the dramatics of Andersen in this play are based on actual truth. Andersen was a solitary figure, was gay and took criticism really badly. There was one instance in which a review of his work was so harsh that he had a full emotional meltdown and lay in the rain in the back garden of none other than Charles Dickens. Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.

I’m not even sure how I’d react if I saw this live. Can we laugh at this? There is humour here, but it’s dark and awkward to laugh at. Should we be laughing? About slavery? Is that how we tackle this issue with twisted humour while the beating heart under the floorboards of unresolved colonial and imperial wounds bleeds?