Peter Viney's Blog

The Lieutenant of Inishmore
By Martin McDonagh

Directed by Michael Grandage
Designed by Christopher Oram

The Michael Grandage Company
The Noel Coward Theatre, London
Saturday 7th July 2018 3 pm

Aidan Turner- Padraic
Denis Conway – Donny
Will Irvine – Christy
Brian Martin – James
Daryl McCormack – Brendan
Julian Moore-Cook – Joey
Charlie Murphy – Mairead
Chris Walley – Davey

LINK TO MY RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW (WITH QUOTES) OF THE RSC 2001 PRODUCTION

It’s been a great three days. Two of my favourite modern productions of the last twenty years were Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem in 2011 and Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore in 2001. We saw the revised Jerusalem at the Watermill on Thursday (5 stars) and the revived Lieutenant of Inishmore today.

Michael Grandage directed a marvellous version of The Cripple of Inishmaan  in 2013, starring Daniel Radcliffe. I’m hoping Grandage completes the trilogy of Arran Islands plays. Grandage is partial to a star name, and this features Aidan Turner from Poldark in the role of Padraic, too mad and too violent for the IRA, so now in the INLA (Irish National Liberation Army). Poldark was the most popular TV drama production of 2015, and 2016 and Turner receive the TV Impact Award. Given the fuss newspapers make over his bare chest every time Ross Poldark wades through the Cornish surf, I’m surprised he keeps his shirt on here. Notably there were far more women than men in the audience. He was also the dwarf Kili in The Hobbit trilogy. The billboard outside the theatre announces Martin McDonagh as the film writer and director of In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri rather than as an award winning playwright, most recently with Hangmen. Don’t ignore media links! The theatre was full.

The guys from the North have arrived: The set (L to R: Daryl McCormack – Brendan, Julian Moore-Cook (Joey), Will irvine (Christy), Aidan Turner- (Padraig) Kneeling – Chris Whalley (Davey), Denis Conway (Donny)

The Noel Coward is a high, four level theatre and proscenium stage, so a major change from the original in the round version at tiny RSC The Other Place.  We were in the stalls and close up. In the top level at the back it’s a LONG way. I’ve done it. To compensate for the size, you get a beautifully detailed cottage interior from designer Christopher Oram, and an impressive front drop of a stylised tree in front of which we have the country road and the Northern Ireland warehouse where Padriag is torturing a drug dealer.

The world has turned since we saw the play with our sons in August 2001. The main event was the Twin Towers, 9/11, very soon after we saw it. Our older son was booked to fly back to university in Chicago on 9/12. It was cancelled, and he flew back four days later.  As the programme notes, 9/11 changed American and World attitudes. It put paid to all that Clancy Brothers on stage “Johnson’s Motor Car / Three Cheers for the Bold IRA” crap at last, and put paid to most of those sentimental Irish pub St Patrick’s Day singalongs + collections for the IRA in Boston, New York and Chicago. The IRA got more finance and weaponry from the USA than it ever did from Colonel Gaddafi.  The genius of the play is the way in which sentimentality (for a cat) and murderous terrorism are so intertwined.  Psychopaths ARE sentimental. It’s also one of the funniest plays I have ever seen. Again.

Davey (Chris Walley) and Donny (Denis Conway) & the cat

The play takes place in 1993. We are in Donny’s cottage on the Island of Inishmore, and young Davey (Chris Walley) has arrived with a dead black cat, its brains dripping out. Donny (Denis Conway) believes Davey ran it over on his sister’s pink bicycle. Whatever, they’re in deep trouble for the cat belongs to Donny’s son Padraic (Aidan Turner). He has owned the cat for fifteen years and it’s the only thing Padraic loves. Padraic’s away in Ulster bombing chip shops and torturing. They decide to break it to him gently, by phoning to say the cat is merely poorly. Padraic, has just finished toenail removal and is interrupted while embarking on nipple removal on James, a drug dealer He is distraught and decides to hurry home. The drug dealer (Brian Martin) is strung upside down throughout a very funny scene. He would have been OK if he’d stuck to dealing only to Protestant school kids but he’d started dealing to Republican kids.

Davey’s sister, Mairead (Charlie Murphy) is as mad as Padraic. She shoots out cows eyes from a distance, which later proves a useful skill. She also loves her cat, Sir Roger, named after Sir Roger Casement, executed after the 1916 Rising. Or ‘that poof’ as Padraig describes him.

Davey and Donny desperately try to black up a ginger cat with boot polish to stand in for Wee Tommy, Padraig’s deceased moggy. What none of them know is that Padraig has fallen out with the INLA for trying to form a splinter group, and that the INLA gets its main finance from protecting drug dealers like James. They are annoyed, and three of them from Ulster are in Inishmore to sort out Padraig. No more plot spoilers. The rest of the play is spattered in blood and severed body parts. Will Padraig and Mairead find true love? Will Padraig execute his own father for feeding Tommy with Frosties?  Who will be left standing?:

L to R: Danny (Chris Whalley), Padraig (Aidan Turner) and Donny (Denis Conway)

Aidan Turner proves yet again that stars of the screen are where they are because of talent. I’ve said the same about Jude Law, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Spacey (sorry, but it’s true), Sean Bean, Rick Mayall, Rowan Atkinson, Ade Edmondson and many others. They shine on stage and have powerful vocal projection too. Aidan Turner has a great gift for comedy and instant charisma. In this all Irish cast, as advertised, he is Irish, born in Dublin (NOT Cornish!).

Chris Whalley as Davey

Donny and Davey were a magical cross generational double act. Chris Whalley, as Davey, has just RADA and one TV production in his programme biography. He gave us a memorable Davey, marked with the full lilting West of Ireland accent instead of the stage Dublin we usually get too.  He stropped, whined, corrected pedantically. Brilliant.

I loved the Northern Irish trio (according to the play text)  of INLA guys (Christy, and two brothers,  Joey and Brendan) though I would have gone stronger on the Northern accents, but maybe the full harsh accent is more Protestant.

McDonagh knows the foul weight of history and puts it in the words of Ulster terrorist Christy on the subject of killing cats:

Christy  Do you know how many cats Oliver Cromwell killed in his time?
Brendan  Lots of cats.
Christy  Lots of cats. And burned them alive. We have a way to go before we’re in that bastard’s league.

The murals in Belfast repeat it … Cromwell / Battle of The Boyne / King Billy … it’s SO far in the past.

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Padraig (Aidan Turner) and Mairead (Charlie Murphy). Padraig is trying to get past the fact that she looks like a boy.

Charlie Murphy was a powerful Mairead – it’s a marvelous role. Feck it, the whole fecking text is marvellous. I loved her in combat gear with rifle adding some lipstick before running into Padraig for the first time. He’s confused by her appearance, thinking longer hair and a dress would improve her, a little note on the inherent sexism of extremist male political groups, I fancy. It extends …

Mairead Do you prefer Inishmore girls, so?
Padraig  I don’t.
Mairead  You don’t prefer boys?
Padraig  I do not prefer boys! There’s no boy preferrers involved in Irish terrorism, I’ll tell you that! They stipulate when you join.

Differences? Well, the real cat at the RSC did its role without a harness, so 2001 wins on the cat acting without wires. In 2001 they played out to the full original Dominic Behan version of The Patriot Game. I recall. I went online and bought it. Incidentally, The Clancy Brothers’ popular version Bowdlerized the lyrics, and removed killing police (as you would if seeking donations), and the criticism of De Valera in the song.

In this production we got extracts sung by Charlie Murphy as Mairead earlier, but no final full song. The song is an important comment, but I think Grandage knew you could not ignore an audience waiting to leap to their feet to applaud at the end. The text does not suggest playing it at the end, and McDonagh chooses the verses Mairead sings with care:

Padraig  It’a a while since I heard that oul song. Wasn’t it one of the Behans wrote that?
Mairead  Dominic.
Padraig  If they’d done a little more bombing and a little less writing I’d’ve had more respect for them.

We walked out into hot sunshine in St. Martin’s Lane at ten to five. Huge cheers from the pubs, draped in England flags, told us England had just beaten Sweden in the World Cup Quarter Finals (I’d checked the half time score in the interval) and the street was crowded with “London Pride” LGBT supporters wearing and waving rainbow flags, faces with rainbow flashes on their cheeks. Trafalgar Square was packed solid for the London Pride march and festival, the roads were closed, which in many ways made our walk to Waterloo Station across the bridge easier – no traffic lights. Tens of thousands of people in a public place having fun.  The mixed smells of frying onions and weed (openly in the street) were incongruous. The tell tale signs of vigilance against terrorism are around us too … concrete blocks line these very prominent spaces to keep cars and vans off. Litter bins are very few and far between. The trains and buses are covered with exhortations to report anything suspicious. It was like that in 1993, with the Irish terrorism campaign too. The perpetrators have changed, got worse even, if that’s possible. I like to think that writers like McDonagh found the best response to terrorists – paint them for what they are: mad, murderous, figures to laugh at.

In an interview just before the play opened in 2001, McDonagh was asked about criticism that his plays, like the earlier The Beauty Queen of Lenahane were critical of “the Irish.” (LINK TO FULL GUARDIAN ARTICLE)

That’s what Beauty Queen was like when we performed it on Inisheer. Leaving aside that nobody turned up on time because of the weather and we were sweating, looking at an empty theatre at 8pm, it was a complete vindication. People loved it. Same all over Ireland. The only place I’ve had any grief is here in London from a few English punters going on about how I was taking the piss out of Irish people.” How does he respond to the inevitable accusations of cultural stereotyping? “I don’t even enter into it. I mean, I don’t feel I have to defend myself for being English or for being Irish, because, in a way, I don’t feel either. And, in another way, of course, I’m both. That’s exactly what the work arises out of, and it’s interesting to me that it tends to be English people who have problems with that.
Martin McDonagh interview by Sean O’Hagen, The Guardian 24 March 2001

Sean O’Hagen made another point about The Lieutenant of Inishmore, true in 2001, thankfully not so today:

Not everyone has got the joke. The play, which receives its world premiere at Stratford next month, has taken five years to reach the stage. In that time, it has been passed over by various prestigious dramatic institutions, including the National Theatre. According to McDonagh, the National’s Trevor Nunn thought the play so inflammatory that its production might threaten the Northern Irish peace process. Nunn’s suitably theatrical overreaction might, McDonagh suspects, be symptomatic of a certain self-important luvvie culture that blights English theatre. Then again, it might be born of the not altogether absurd notion that making fun of extreme Irish Republican terrorist groups – in this instance, the Irish National Liberation Army – may, quite literally, be a deadly serious business.
Sean O’Hagen, The Guardian 24 March 2001

End result? Standing ovation downstairs and up. My second five star play in three days!

We should note that McDonagh is equally happy in writing in Irish, British (Hangmen) and American (Three Billboards) English. The great news is that it is being filmed, so should be a future broadcast to screens. The other great news is a new McDonagh play, A Very Very Dark Matter opens at The Bridge Theatre this autumn.

*****

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
5 star
London Theatre Direct based on 62 x customer reviews *****
Benjy Potty, The Sun *****
4 star
Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph ****
Paul Taylor, Independent ****
Michael Billington, Guardian ****
Ann Treneman, The Times ****
Quentin Letts, Daily Mail ****
David Jays, Sunday Times ****
Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard ****
Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out ****
Deirde O’Brien, Daily Mirror ****

3 star
Matt Truman, What’s On Stage ***
Natasha Tripney The Stage ***

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