A Bloody Riot: New Rep's 'The Lieutenant of Inishmore'
As printed in the Boston Irish Reporter, Ocotober 2008. Click here for original pdf.
By: R. J. DONOVAN, special to the BIR
Playwright Martin McDonagh has a dark, disturbing comedic style that often makes theatergoers shift uncomfortably in their seats. Shocking audiences one minute,
he sends them into fits of uncontrollable laughter the next.
Born in London to Irish parents, the award-winning writer is best known for such plays as "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," "A Skull in Connemara," and "The Pillowman." Provocative and controversial, he has been nominated for four "Best Play" Tony Awards, picked up an Oscar for the Irish comedy short, "The Six Shooter," and earlier this year wrote and directed the film, "In Bruges," starring Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes.
Locally, several of his plays have found a home at New Repertory Theatre in Watertown. His black comedy, "The Lieutenant of Inishmore," opens there on Oct. 16 with a cast
featuring Colin Hamell, Rory James Kelly, and Karl Baker Olson.
First produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2001, "The Lieutenant" is the middle-third of what's become known as McDonagh's Aran Islands Trilogy of plays set off the west coast of Ireland.
Commenting on the upcoming production, Rick Lombardo, New Rep's Producing Artistic Director, said, "I love Martin McDonagh's writing and I've been very proud that New Rep has been the theater that has done more of his work and introduced him more to the Boston area than any other local theater."
The unapologetic farce offers a gruesome look at the actions of Padraic, the demented leader of a militant terrorist splinter group who trots through life casually attacking
people and lobbing explosives with a cavalier "all in a day's work" attitude. However, when someone dares harm his best friend in the world, a little cat by the name of Wee Thomas, all hell breaks loose. Was the cat's mutilation an accident or an execution? Either way, Padraic comes completely unglued at the senseless brutality of the tabby's downfall.
Lombardo explained, "[McDonagh] is dabbling in the same kind of medium as say, Quentin Tarantino . . . taking violence to this kind of uber-degree in order to make us somehow laugh at the absurdity of it -- the insanity of violence as a solution to any
problem, which it's not. I find him to be a very sharp observer." Lombardo adds
that McDonagh looks at life through "a very clearly focused comedic lens. He's a comic playwright. That's the thing that I think people have to remember."
During the Broadway run (which reportedly used six gallons of fake blood for every performance), The New York Times advised audiences to "turn off your political correctness monitor along with your cell phone." David R. Gammons, who's directing the play at New Rep, said, "What draws people to it as an exciting piece of theater is the tension between just how violent the play is -- gory, horrific even -- and how hilarious [people]
find the situations." "The play owes a lot to the absurd. Capital 'A' absurd."
Lombardo agrees. "McDonagh's not doing some kind of kitchen sink realism where he's trying to depict life as it is. He always looks at a situation and takes it to the absurd extreme to mine the comic value within it." Contrasting McDonagh's work with that of awardwinning playwright Conor McPherson, Lombardo said, "Conor is much more interested in real people, and exploring real people in much more realistic situations. McDonagh is not about that at all. He lies as much in the stream of Samuel Becket as in the stream of Irish playwright J. M. Synge, for example (co-founder of the Abbey
Theater and author of 'Playboy of the Western World')."
To avoid any misunderstanding, Gammons cautions, "The play is not in any way a documentary about the troubles in Ireland. It's a comedy and a satire ... the terrorism (is) a sort of jumping off place. It reflects on the absurdity and the ridiculousness of violence in a larger way. It resonates whether you’re thinking about Ireland in particular or what's going on in Darfur or Palestine or wherever you want to point your finger [at] political unrest and strife and struggle among humans."
While past audiences at New Rep will already be familiar with McDonagh's trademark style, Gammons hopes that "Inishmore" will cast a wide net and draw in a host of
new theater-goers. "It's wonderful to do this play in the Boston area," he said, because, "there's such a vital and vibrant Irish community within the Boston scene."
The bottom line is that Gammons very clearly understands his role in guiding the play. "It's not my job as a director to decide how the audience will respond," he said. "I do
the play, and the audience gets to choose what they think about it, and what they feel about it, and what they take away from it." That said, he's been quietly amused at people's reactions when he describes the bloody premise of the story. He said audiences
are more than accepting when characters die at the end of a Shakespearean tragedy or a Jacobean revenge play. "I've done a lot of plays where everybody dies at the end," he laughed. However, he said, if you tell people that a cat dies in the play, "They're all up in arms."
"What McDonagh is doing, and I think brilliantly, is pointing out that our sympathy as
an audience is aroused exponentially for the cat but not necessarily for the humans. I love the audacity of that."
"The Lieutenant of Inishmore," October 26 - November 16 at the Arsenal Center for the
Arts, 321 Arsenal Street, Watertown. For information, call 617-923-8487.