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
© Online Review London
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