The Lieutenant of Inishmore (review)

The Lieutenant of Inishmore. By Martin McDonagh. Royal Shakespeare Company, The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon. 27 July 2001.

In the late 1990s, Martin McDonagh enjoyed the most auspicious theatrical debut since that of Oscar Wilde. Produced in thirty-nine countries in twenty-seven languages, McDonagh's plays were performed in North America last year more often than those of any other playwright save Shakespeare. Five years ago, McDonagh announced that he had two Irish trilogies: The Leenane Plays and The Aran Plays, the latter comprised of The Cripple of Inishmaan,The Lieutenant of Inishmore, the first-written of the Aran plays (1994), and The Banshees of Inisheer. Since June 1997, however, no new works have appeared because McDonagh was committed to seeing The Lieutenant of Inishmore produced before allowing his Inisheer play and two non-Irish plays, The Pillar Man and Dead Days at Coney, to debut. The difficulty came in finding a company willing to mount the play, which calls for dangerous stage illusions and horrific violence and is openly offensive to Irish republicans, animal rights advocates, and others.

Druid, the Galway company that premiered The Lonesome West and A Skull in Connemara as well as the Leenane Plays as a trilogy, declined. So did Britain's Royal National Theatre, which first produced The Cripple of Inishmaan and sponsored McDonagh as writer-in-residence. The Royal Court, which mounted the London premiere of The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1994, turned it down twice, under two artistic directors, explaining to McDonagh's agent, Rod Hall, that the problem was the artistic quality of the play, not its incendiary subject matter. After languishing for four years since the last new McDonagh play appeared and seven years since it was written, The Lieutenant of Inishmore opened in a "protected" performance in April 2000 in the smallest of the RSC's Stratford stages, the 170-seat The Other Place.

Set in 1993, The Lieutenant of Inishmore depicts a plot by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) to assassinate a renegade terrorist, Mad Padraic. To lure Padraic to his native Inishmore, three INLA men kill what he loves: his black cat, Wee Thomas. Fearing that Padraic will blame and punish them for the cat's death, his father, Donny, and the seventeen year-old Davey hatch a ludicrous scheme to cover a tabby cat with black shoe polish and fob it off as Wee Thomas. When Padraic returns home, he meets Davey's sister, Mairead, who is equally infatuated with Padraic and the INLA. Together they execute the INLA men but when she realizes Padraic killed her cat, Mairead murders him.

Five of the play's nine scenes are set in Donny's Inishmore cottage. Except for indoor plumbing and a telephone, both conspicuously used in this performance, little has changed since Synge portrayed the rural Irish cottage in In the Shadow of the Glen in 1903. Austerity and intimacy, if not poverty and claustrophobia, prevail in Francis O'Connor's set. The only setting rendered realistically, the cottage provides a playing area not much larger than the original Abbey stage (21 x 15 feet). A low stone wall sets off the cottage from an open playing area that variously serves as a warehouse in Northern Ireland or a country lane. In the first scene, however, the audience focuses on the dead cat, "its head half missing." Although there are parallels in Synge's plays, the extent of the violence against animals in this play--two cats assassinated, cows blinded, and a dog killed when it chokes on its owner's severed nose--is unprecedented.

McDonagh's stage directions are so demanding that one of them, to hang the drug dealer whom Padraic tortures "upside down from the ceiling," was not realized. Similarly, at this performance the final gunshot, delivered by Mairead through Padraic's skull, was without sound--so the blood squib sprayed although no retort was heard. There are other difficulties with this production. Characters from Inishmore are not distinguished...