|
|
 |
Producers
Nick Starr
Sonia Friedman
Director
Wilson Milam
Design
Francis O'Connor
Cast
Joey
Glenn Chapman
Donny
Trevor Cooper
Mairead
Elaine Cassidy
Davy
Domhnall Gleeson
Brendan
Luke Griffin
James
Paul Lloyd
Padraig
Peter McDonald
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Royal
Shakespeare Company
Garrick
Theatre
20
June – 2 November 2002 |
|
Martin McDonagh's
play is a blacker–than–black
satire mocking the pretensions of Irish
republican paramilitaries. Written six
years ago, it was initially shunned
by the National and the Royal Court
– either because of considerations
of taste, or because the play jarred
with the spirit of reconciliation fostered
by the peace process– before eventually
finding a home in Stratford last year.
It has now arrived in the West End,
in the unlikely opulence of the Garrick.
McDonagh's
anti–hero is Padraig, a maverick
lieutenant in the fringe republican
grouping the INLA. We first encounter
him in a warehouse, fresh from a campaign
of chip shop bombings in the North,
and just about to take the nipples off
a trussed–up drug–dealer using
a rusty blade. The play follows Padraig's
return to Inishmore, where he has been
tipped off that his best friend in the
world, wee Thomas the cat, is poorly.
The cat, it turns out, is worse than
poorly, having had his brains blown
out by Padraig's INLA colleagues in
an attempt to lure their wayward lieutenant
back home. All hell threatens to break
loose as Padraig goes in search of justice
on behalf of the murdered moggy, and
indeed it does.
The result
is a magnificent comic construction,
energetic and hugely entertaining. Peter
McDonald puts in a brilliantly playful
performance as the dashing psychopath
Padraig. Elaine Cassidy, who played
alongside Nicole Kidman in the film
The Others,
makes her West End debut and is luminous
in the role of ferocious young Mairead,
as committed to the armed struggle as
she is to bedding Padraig. Trevor Cooper,
one of the few survivors of the Stratford
production, adds a touch of wistful
maturity to a vibrant young cast.
Along
with novelists like Patrick McCabe,
McDonagh is part of a new stable of
Irish writers, who are determined to
rejig the romantic idyll of rural Ireland
with themes drawn from the popular culture
imported to Ireland in the last thirty
years. His plays are influenced by The
Clash and Quentin Tarantino as much
as by J. M. Synge and Sean O'Casey.
The Lieutenant
of Inishmore also mines a rich
vein of black Northern Irish comedy
about the troubles, most of which has
yet to be translated for English audiences.
There is something here to offend just
about everyone. When Mairead is about
to leave for battle in the North, her
mother sends her off with the warning:
"Now don't go blowing up any kids."
"It's incidents like this", another
characters reflects during a lull in
the shooting, "that puts tourists off
Ireland." Meanwhile, Padraig's INLA
colleagues worry about the ethics of
blowing up Airey Neave: "Sure there
was no point doing a fella just because
he had a funny name".
The anarchic
horror of the play is its main strength
but also leads to its central weakness.
McDonagh has got the black comedy and
the razor–sharp repartee pitch–perfect,
but beneath it all the characters never
throw off their stereotypes, or say
anything that might humanise their dilemmas.
His suggestion, too, that the problems
of Northern Ireland are the work of
a few dewy–eyed nutters seems a
little naive, not to say passé.
McDonagh is interested in the relationship
between cruelty and sentimentality;
he wants to show us the hypocrisy of
people who can cry over a dead cat,
but who are capable of dispatching both
friends and family without a second
thought. When he has his gunmen blinded
by an air pistol and wandering the stage,
eyes bloodied and aimlessly firing at
each other, he wants to show us the
moral blindness of political violence.
By the
end of the play, however, the audience
is no longer recoiling from the bloodletting
but laughing along, almost baying for
more. Maybe McDonagh is hinting that
we are all complicit in the murderous
cycle of violence. But any force which
his satire commands has already lost
itself in the song and dance of all
the pantomime horror. While the bodies
pile up, one of the characters raises
a laugh from the audience when he confides
in us: "Worse and worse this story gets."
As the curtain rolls, you half expect
the dead to leap up from the blood–soaked
stage and lead a rousing chorus of "When
Irish eyes are smiling"
James Harkin |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
