A storm in a tuna can

"Laughing wild amidst severest woe" a line from Thomas Grey or Samuel Beckett; I really couldn't make out who actually wrote it despite my delving into Wikipedia, epitomises a weird and wonderful play by Christopher Durang put up at St James Cavalier theatre in the round by MADC. Directed spectacularly by Polly March, the electrically charged crackle and bop of the intellectually deep dialogue was splendidly conveyed by Denise Mulholland and Alan Montanaro starring as the Woman and the Man.

Who can envisage a play wherein the characters are brought together by a can of tuna? Indeed the can is of paramount importance. Its very insignificance is overwhelmingly important. As the crazed but always too lucid Woman hits the hapless Man on the head with a can of tuna at a supermarket for no reason other than his being in her way, a concatenation of events and situations presents itself. Events that escalate from being in each other's disconcerting dreams to the Man appearing in full imperial regalia as the Infant of Prague being interviewed on a chat show by the Woman who has just murdered the presenter!

Both Ms Mulholland and Mr Montanaro kept the audience spellbound. The monologues were even more electrifying for their being spoken in this particular theatre where proximity with the audience creates such amazing immediacy. Both characters are rebels. The growing capitalism and indifference that characterised the Reagan administration are the backdrops to a scenario in which Ms Mulholland introduces herself. Speaking one's innermost thoughts aloud; thoughts that one actually does think but keeps tightly locked up in one's inner self, embarrassing thoughts that are usually lost in a jumbled stream of consciousness that nobody but you will ever know. The woman confesses that her wild verbal diatribes actually exhaust her doctors at the various mental institutions in which she has been periodically confined.

The play, like an 18th century sonata divides into three movements, Laughing Wild, Seeking Wild and Dreaming Wild. Laughing Wild is all the Woman's; a torrent of dialogue that like demented loops deviates from and then returns, with the twitch of a thread, to the scene in the supermarket. One is again convinced that there is a very thin line between genius and madness. The Woman's dialogue is highly charged with imagery that one can only use if one is a bluestocking of the first degree. From Bleak House to hubris to Camus and existentialism and The Sistine Chapel we are eventually convinced that the Woman's madness is divine for "the divine is impractical, that's why it's divine!"

Seeking Wild is all the Man's. Fresh from a "personality workshop"; one of those obsessions that our transatlantic cousins tend to obsess about, Mr Montanaro informs us about his strange experience in the supermarket when a mad woman biffed him one while choosing a can of tuna! This play was written in the 1980s; a time when AIDS was still new on the scene and the powers that be were letting it be known that it was God's punishment for the permissiveness of post Stonewall America. When, accidentally on purpose, the Man lets slip that he is gay, the entire spiel that since then we have heard ad nauseam is spat out with intense pathos, hurt and anger. A spiel that to date in this little bigoted island of ours has had no effect on those who insist that sexual relations between men and Women should be restricted to the simplicity of plugs and sockets; conveniently forgetting all about transformers, multiple plugs and extension wires! The "all right jacks" have not changed. They still look down from their rickety perches and condemn those whom they think are different from them and therefore inferior.

Durang takes the anti-religious stance one step further in the phantasmagoric final scene, Dreaming Wild, wherein both characters finally get together. At the apex of it the Man appears dressed as the Infant of Prague, which, when one thinks about it, is one of the most incongruous of Christ's representations. The Christ Child appears dressed as a 17th Century Habsburg prince reflecting the times in which religious bigotry was rife and the Defenestration of Prague triggered off the Thirty Years War. A more apt message about the irrelevance of Catholicism could not be found. With an impassivity that belied his well-known penchant to be the panto dame, Mr Montanaro voiced the usual glib Catholic arguments for sex restricted to that between a man and a woman within the confines of marriage that irritated the newly minted interviewer, The Woman, no end to the extent that once again she biffs him one. The dream becomes hallucination. Both characters see their fathers in baked potatoes and alternate humming of Moonriver and Vilya Vilya from the Merry Widow. Complete and total madness takes over.

Almost 30 years have passed since the original play was put up and yet the stark messages conveyed by the dialogue remain as pertinently apt as they were then. Although the audience, myself included, could not help but titter away at the more absurd statements and actions, the whole thing was deadly serious. Too serious to ignore. Messages that in today's world force you to mull over the lack of empathy, hypocrisy and gross injustice into which we were forced by 9/11 and all it sparked off. As the author himself said in his note to MADC "I have a recurring fear/upset of what I term as 'crazy people', both in my family and the real world, who cause trouble by acting rashly and without concern for repercussions. President G. W. Bush fits this description rather strongly as well, so right now I find it very hard to be a citizen in this country whose leader seems rash and to act on impulse".

Nothing changes very much does it?