How should we react to hearing men choose which famous woman to rape? David Ireland has an answer. Turn it into a manic farce that has the audience rolling about with laughter.
That is what happened at last night’s performance of Ulster American, a play first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2018, and now revived in a new production directed by Jeremy Herrin, with three superb actors.
A white male Hollywood actor, Jay Conway, is passing the time in the home of the theatre director Leigh Carver (Andy Serkis) as they await the arrival of the writer Ruth Davenport (Louisa Harland) from Northern Ireland. They are, the following day, to begin rehearsing her theatre play, so the meeting is important.
Jay ponders the use of the “n-word”, quoting a black writer who claims because white people created it, they should own it.
Moving to the subject of women, they discuss which famous women they would rape. Jay, claiming to be a feminist with a lot of respect for Princess Diana, would rape her, to increase her empathy for victims of rape.
When Ruth finds out about this lad's talk, she isn’t quite as impressed and angrily says, “fuck you,” to Jay, who, rather than being offended by the language, compliments her “balls”, even saying he feels like lifting them to his mouth.
In tone and expression, Woody Harrelson gives Jay shades of the narcissistic idiocy of Donald Trump. Full of himself, he talks about the famous people he knows, his attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous and the films he has appeared in.
Every physical movement he makes, from suddenly doing handstands or simply narrowing his eyes, generates spontaneous laughter.
There is no depth to this overlong hundred-minute situation comedy. The cartoon characters never feel remotely real, from their initially slightly drunken, pub-style verbal ramblings to the Grand Guignol horror finish of blood and violence.
The political right might celebrate it as an exposé of what they regard as the performative irritation of the “woke brigade”. At the same time, liberals might console themselves with the idea that it reveals the opportunist superficiality of some in the creative industry who claim to be on board with the outrage of #MeToo.
Meanwhile, some men watching might feel relief when they next tell a joke about raping women, and perhaps an occasional man hearing the jokes might feel less inhibited about trying it out.