McDonagh's "Lieutenant of Inishmore' (3rd review)

Scene I: Two men discuss (and display) a decapitated cat.

Scene II: A man hung upside down is being tortured. The torturer asks him which of his nipples he'd rather have cut off.

So begins Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a play that features corpses, human and animal, sawed-off body parts, and lots and lots of blood.

Don't say you weren't warned.

I came to this play fresh, if that's the word, from seeing the same author's A Skull in Connemara at the Lantern Theater. In that play, a gravedigger and his assistant get their jollies by smashing human skulls. In this one, another odd couple, Donny and Davey, cut up several bodies with a hacksaw and assorted other implements, including a cross that's used as a stake.

In their defense, it isn't a job they've chosen, and they don't seem to take much pleasure in it. But they get on with it anyway.

Compared to Pinter….

What is Martin McDonagh up to? And why— a more difficult question— do audiences want to see it?

His plots are anti-plots; his characters are anti-characters. He's a modern minor Jacobean who shares with classical Revenge tragedies a taste for gore and a desire to pile up as many bodies as the stage will hold.

Like Harold Pinter, McDonagh has a nose for the nasty. Unlike Pinter, his characters don't suggest depths of mystery and perhaps evil; rather, they lack any depth whatever. Too wacky for satire, too absurd to be anything but cartoons, McDonagh's plays are Punch 'n Judy shows whose figures exchange haymakers and insults and keep getting up for more until someone lands a lethal blow.

In search of a plot

There could be a plot here, but McDonagh raises the suggestion only to subvert it. The "lieutenant" of the play's title is Padraic (Paul Felder), whom we meet as the torturer of Scene II. His victim, James (Keith Conallen), is being punished for trying to peddle drugs to schoolchildren— a serious offense, to be sure, but perhaps one for the courts.

Padraic has his own problems in any case, since he's a psychopathic killer whose goal in life is to form an Irish Republican Army splinter group, the INLA. The plan is to reunite Ireland and wreak mayhem in the meantime.

Padraic links up with Mairead (Elena Bossler), an equally bloody-minded tomgirl who shoots out the eyes of cattle for target practice. Think Bonnie and Clyde, without the banks. Since the minimum (or ideal) size for an IRA splinter is two, they make a team.

Padraic has run afoul of the local IRA by torturing James, however, since it is funded with drug money. Christy (William Zielinski), the IRA's honcho, accordingly goes gunning for Padraic.

As I say, there could be a plot here, as well as a commentary on IRA dead-enders who've long since deteriorated into simple thugs. But McDonagh sets the situation up only to travesty it.

The inevitable cat

Padraic's grand passion in life, indeed his only affective relationship of any kind, is his cat, Wee Tom, whom he has left in the care of his father, Donny (Pearce Bunting) and Mairead's brother, Davey (Robert DaPonte). This cat appears to have met the untoward fate of Scene I, which alarms its caretakers. Donny knows he's a goner if he can't produce a live cat for his son, and the "story" hinges on this peg. You can fill in the blanks from here.

How should an audience react? The opening night theatergoers at Plays and Players laughed, as did their New York counterparts before them.

But what kind of laughter was it? The kind, I guess, that Punch 'n Judy shows elicit, or Roadrunner cartoons. When we see violence we don't believe in, we laugh— first out of nervousness and then, sufficiently assured, from relief.

Finally, we simply indulge ourselves, the way we do with video games. Nobody, we conclude, is really getting hurt, because nobody is really there— only figures set up for a bloody slapstick. That is to say, we're given license to enjoy simulated pain.

I hope it isn't prudish to say that I generally look for more from the theater.

Actors' holiday

The production is first-rate. I suspect there's something liberating about playing a character who makes no sense at all, and is therefore exactly what he does at any given moment and nothing more. Paul Felder has that kind of fun with Padraic, and Pearce Bunting and William Zielinski, as the play's elder figures, are also very good. So is Elena Bossler in her Junior Miss Faye Dunaway role.

Matt Pfeiffer's direction keeps the bloody business moving nimbly— no small feat of blocking and pacing in a play with 60 gunshots going off, corpses piling up and an animal performer to deal with. All in all, Theatre Exile is to be congratulated on every aspect of this production, except for its choice of a play.

I'm all for outrage in the theater. It ought to be a confrontational medium, not a comforting one, and the American stage takes far too little risk today. But there's humor and humor— and Martin McDonagh seems permanently stuck in the fifth grade.

A further point was suggested to me by a friend, commenting on the brogues in this year's Philadelphia Irish festival. If plays like McDonagh's were performed in South Philly accents and settings, he asked, would they seem so funny? The Old Sod is a convenient target because it's far away, and American audiences (including Irish-Americans) can laugh at stereotypes about it in a way that's condescendingly easy. Would a play about turf wars in Gray's Ferry, or a serial killer in Kensington, similarly represented, seem quite so amusing?

A genuinely tragic loss

On a more somber note, Theatre Exile's program paid tribute to the gifted young actress Melissa Lynch, who died in a car wreck on December 30. I saw Lynch as Sonya in the Lantern Theater's recent production of Uncle Vanya, a role about blighted promise and dreams never to be realized. Lynch had a fine body of work behind her, and a fine future ahead. It's a tragic loss.♦


To read another review by Pamela and Gresham Riley, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.