Cats get such a raw deal in Martin McDonagh’s bloody farce The Lieutenant of Inishmore that they’re mentioned in the show’s trigger warning. The poor felines are daubed with shoe polish, shot, bashed in the head, run over by a bicycle and murdered off-stage by an IRA splinter group.
This brutality – and the human-on-human killing spree that follows it – will likely come as no surprise to those familiar with McDonagh’s output, which includes the films In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin.
In the latter, the writer used the seemingly absurd breakdown of a friendship as a metaphor for a divided Ireland. In The Lieutenant, first produced in 2001 by the Royal Shakespeare Company, he makes the psychotic reaction of an Irish independence fighter to the death of his beloved cat demonstrate how senseless causes can become.
The play opens in a messy 1990s kitchen where Donny (Heartstopper’s Alan Turkington) and Davey (Taylor McClaine) are scrambling to cover up the first cat death before its owner – “too mad for the IRA” Padraic – discovers his loss. In turn, Padraic is preoccupied with his own personal mission which he describes as the quest for a free Ireland but includes apparently unrelated tasks such as pulling toenails off low-level drug dealers and threatening to execute his dad.
Director Chris Sonnex’s production very much plays the lines for laughs, which works best when highlighting the absurdity of the cycle of violence triggered by Wee Thomas’s death but bulldozes through the subtle shifts of tone in McDonagh’s script.
Those moments when the audience would be brought up short and forced to question what they are laughing along with – and are therefore complicit in – are lost.
Julian Moore-Cook plays Padriac like a charismatic Mafioso – chillingly anaesthetised to extreme violence yet devastated by Wee Thomas’s unfortunate fate. Meanwhile, Turkington and McClaine are a strong double act, their ping-ponging banter crumbling into delirious laughter as they are dragged into the sadistic maelstrom unfolding around them. McClaine’s take on Davey fleshes out a character that could be reduced to an archetypal fool, adding a tinge of desperation and naivete to his jokey nature. And Jason Kelly seems like an old hand in his professional stage debut as teenage republican Joey.
More of this light-handling overall would have given the play’s themes further oomph, but as the fake blood dries on the stage it is impossible to ignore its overall message.
Main image: The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Everyman Theatre, Liverpool. Photo by Gary Calton.
The Lieutenant of Inishmore is at Everyman Theatre, Liverpool until October 12, 2024. For more information, click here.
