Funny is a play that dares you to laugh. It is a curious spectacle, a play allegedly based on ‘real reports‘, and its stage wallows in the shambolic. But shambolic theatre it isn’t. It’s a breathtakingly ambitious project, written by Tim Nunn for Reeling & Writhing, that sets out to explore the power of humour as a weapon of torture, and very much succeeds.
Tommy Mullins plays Paul, a young army officer perfecting his comic techniques as a tool to extract information from Middle Eastern terror suspects, trained to resist torture by way of meditation. As ‘traditional’ interrogation methods fail, the UK Security Services enlist Paul along with a veteran comedian (Keith MacPherson ) to use humour as a means of unsettling the detainees’ resolve.
Mullins puts on a riveting show with his jump-cut-Chaplin-silent-movie style, and charms us with his stand-up-comedy scene routine. When he interacts with a member of the audience, we feel at ease; we’re in familiar ‘funny’ territory. Not so: because ‘good-cops’ play ‘bad cops’ too.
As Mullins tries to convince MacPherson of the ‘humanity’ of his weapon – humour – contrasting it with the ‘traditional’ torture methods of nail-pulling and waterboarding, we’re touched by his ‘humane’ values, but not for long. Humour, he elaborates, is a tool that remains undetected, it cannot be proven as a method of torture.
As the play evolves, so does the audience’s perception: our senses are bombarded from all sides with bright lights/sudden darkness/loud sounds and the macabre mingles with the funny and the surreal is at times rational. Humour is chaotic and humour is power too, Nunn seems to say, as we watch Paul’s descent into madness.
The conflict intensifies when we get a taste of Donald Pirie’s character as the sadistic officer. The (now) iconic Abu-Ghraib black hood takes centre stage and we shudder. Nunn pulls the writing off beautifully here with his rhetorical question: which would you rather have, laughter as weapon of interrogation or the black hood? What is the difference? And does it matter?
The makeshift staging, the amazing performance of the trio – Mullins, MacPherson and Pirie – and Tim Nunn’s powerful script make Funny a must-see, but not for the faint-hearted. Humour is power, power dis-empowers and we all choke on the realization of this. How ‘funny’ is that?
Tommy Mullins in Funny: Don’t Make Me Laugh by Tim Nunn and Reeling & Writhing
Donald Pirie, Tommy Mullins and Keith MacPherson in Funny: Don’t Make Me Laugh
