Peter Viney's Blog

The Lieutenant of Inishmore
by Martin McDonagh

Directed by Wilson Milam
Designed by Francis O’Connor

The Royal Shakespeare Company
at
The Other Place, Stratford-Upon-Avon

Monday 13th August 2001, 19.30

RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW

This is the second in a series of retrospectives of productions seen long prior to the blog. As such, it was inspired by booking the 2018 London production. The play started in Stratford in April 2001, and we saw it in August after being amazed by reviews. I’d assume it ran, stopped and was revived. Stratford was an unusually long journey for us to the theatre in those days, and we took our two sons. We had read the reviews, and were astonished to find just how tiny the RSC’s Other Place was. It has recently re-opened. I can’t review so much as quote others, seventeen years on. I know it was a definitive 5 star production, and I had never realized that you can train a cat to act. The play text is dedicated to “Pussy (1981-1995)” The production transferred to London, where it played at The Pit in the Barbican in 2002.

CAST
Owen Sharpe – Davey
Trevor Cooper- Donny
David Wilmot- Padraig
Conor Moloney – James
Kerry Condon – Mairead
Colin Mace- Christy
Glenn Chapman – Joey
Stuart Goodwin – Brendan

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is set on the island of Inishmore, in County Galway in 1993. It starts with the discovery of a dead cat. Trouble is, the cat is the only thing in the world that Mad Padraig loves. Mad Padraig was too mad and too violent even for the IRA, and so he’s off away in the North with the INLA for a spot of torture and bombing. What are they going to do about the dead cat?  They think it best to wean him to the idea, especially as they’ve interrupted him pulling out a suspected traitor’s toenails. So they suggest the cat is unwell. But Padraig has to race home to tend to the ailing feline. I do remember that the sawn off limbs and blood on stage after the interval exceeded anything in Titus Adronicus. McDonagh takes on terrorism and nails it in one of the funniest plays I have ever seen.

Years later, we took the taxi political tour of Belfast, and the guide stayed remarkably even-handed in all his descriptions of the troubles (though Belfast taxis are allegedly all Republican). At one point he pointed out his uncle’s name on a monument and explained he had been in prison for ten years. We ventured to say ‘What for?’ ‘Just the usual. The bombing,’ he answered. Incidentally, Belfast is a splendid city break destination, and the taxi tour is one of the most interesting trips I’ve ever done on a visit.

I’m going to rely on quotes then. The first is the most detailed, and the full Lizzie Loveridge review is linked HERE.

The performances are all excellent — particularly David Wilmot as the double holstered Padraic whose motto is “shoot first, ask idiotic questions later”. He is volatile and extremely dangerous. When the INLA arrive at the house, he says “Come in ahead for yourselves. I’m just in the middle of shooting me Dad.” Davey and Donny make a pair of comic incompetents, Donny looks like a Hells Angel gone to seed and Davey is a country boy who is very precious about his pony tailed hair but rides a Barbie pink push bike. Kerry Condon as Mairead has all the enthusiasm of a young woman trying to succeed in a man’s world — think Joan of Arc. Some of the funniest lines are when her sexual approaches to Padraic are met with the suggestion that she should grow her hair or wear a frock or learn how to cook and sew … in design terms it mostly takes place in and around Donny’s cottage with its broken down furniture and general filth but the recreation of bloody corpses of cats and humans is authentic, gutsy and makes the film Seven look genteel. The lighting too helps here. Wilson Milam, an American directs and he never shies away from the torture, brutality and the carnage.
Lizzie Loveridge, Curtain Up London Review

Martin McDonagh is a brave man. For this blackly brilliant blood-boltered comedy has dared to tackle the sentimentality behind the macho ethic of high terrorism,
Michael Billington

Part satire, part farce, part Jacobean bloodbath, McDonagh dares to send up terrorism by revealing its practicioners as mindless, sentimental brutes. There’s something of Joe Orton ion McDonagh’s tastelessness, but he dares to go further. (‘It’s incidents like this that do put tourists off Ireland,’ says a terrorist with utmost seriousness, referring to cat-braining … it will make you sick, but with laughter, not horror. Shockingly good. Don’t miss.
Georgina Brown, Mail on Sunday, 2001

Few reviews survive intact online, but fortunately Dominic Cavendish’s review in The Telegraph 30 June 2001 does (FOLLW LINK). A quote:

If I were Martin McDonagh, I’m not sure whom I’d be more afraid of sitting next to during the RSC’s premiere of my latest play: a member of the Irish National Liberation Army, a fanatical cat lover or a representative of the Aran islands’ tourist board …  It packs huge quantities of idiotic violence against man and moggie into a blackly humorous and sporadically stomach-churning evening. All this young playwright’s work to date has characterised the rural Irish as quick to a grudge, slow to comprehend and inordinately fond of casual cruelty to fellow man and passing beast. Here, the stereotype has been stretched to a dangerously grotesque limit: the islanders barely seem to have two brain cells to rub together or a jot of compassion for each other … . Scaled against the horrors perpetrated over the past 30 years, the net result of the characters’ trivial obsessions is to make Lieutenant feel like a small play about a big subject. Wilson Milam’s production manages to find a playing style that wards off caricature, as well as orchestrating gunshots and limb-severings to graphic effect.

Martin McDonagh was interviewed in The Guardian in March 2001 before the play’s premiere:

I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty, because I think one illuminates the other. And, yeah, I tend to push things as far as I can because I think you can see things more clearly through exaggeration than through reality. It’s like a John Woo or a Tarantino scene, where the characters are doing awful things and, simultaneously, talking about everyday things in a really humorous way. There is a humour in there that is straight-ahead funny and uncomfortable. It makes you laugh and think …
I know I’ll probably get a lot of shit for it, because I don’t come from Northern Ireland, but I would never let that stop me. Plus, everyone was affected by the violence, including people in London. Having grown up Catholic and, to a certain degree, Republican, I thought I should tackle the problems on my own side, so to speak. I chose the INLA because they seemed so extreme and, to be honest, because I thought I’d be less at risk. I’m not being heroic or anything – it was just something I felt I had to write about. The play came from a position of what you might call pacifist rage. I mean, it’s a violent play that is wholeheartedly anti-violence. The bottom line, I suppose, is that I believe that if a piece of work is well written, you can tackle anything. …
I kind of felt that this stuff had to be dealt with in the blackly sick way in which we sometimes react to it. I think a lot of the stuff that has happened in the past 25 years has been a sick joke. I’m not trying to solve anything, the same way as I am not trying to damage anything; just looking at it in a different way. I mean, how else can you react to all that has happened through writing, or art or whatever you want to call it, if not through absurdity?
Martin McDonagh, 2001

There were nay-sayers in a tiny minority, but there always are:

The Lieutenant is a comedy-thriller — probably the most overworked genre of the last decade — but the jokes aren’t nearly funny enough. The whole script needs ‘punching up’, to use a bit of Hollywood lingo. The impression I got was of a lazy writer who couldn’t be bothered to do any more work on a half-finished piece of work. Sod it, he evidently thought. I wrote The Beauty Queen of Leenane, one of the most commercially successful new plays of the Nineties, so whatever I write will get produced. In any case, I’m better than fucking Shakespeare!
Toby Young, The Spectator, 2002

LINK TO 2018 PRODUCTION

MARTIN McDONAGH ON THIS BLOG
The Lieutenant of Inishmore, RSC 2001
The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Grandage Company 2018
The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh, Grandage Season, West End 2013
Hangmen, by Martin McDonagh, Royal Court, London 2015
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (FILM)
The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Arena Theatre, 2018
A Very, Very Dark Matter, Bridge Theatre 2018