McDonagh - The Lieutenant of Inishmore

Methuen Drama Modern Classics

The Methuen Drama Modern Plays series has always been at the forefront of modern playwriting and has reflected the most exciting developments in modern drama since 1959. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Methuen Drama, the series was relaunched in 2009 as Methuen Drama Modern Classics, and continues to offer readers a choice selection of the best modern plays.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore

Who knocked Mad Padraics cat over on a lonely road on the island of Inishmore and was it an accident? Hell want to know when he gets back from a stint of torture and chip-shop bombing in Northern Ireland: he loves his cat more than life itself.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a brilliant satire on terrorism, a powerful corrective to the beautification of violence in contemporary culture, and a hilarious farce.

Martin McDonaghs first play The Beauty Queen of Leenane was the 1996 winner of the George Devine Award, won the Writers Guild Award for Best Fringe Play and also the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer. The play was nominated for six Tony awards, of which it won four, and a Laurence Olivier Award (the BBC Award for Best New Play). The Beauty Queen of Leenane is the first in Martin McDonaghs Leenane Trilogy; A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West complete the cycle. A Skull in Connemara was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best New Comedy. Martin McDonaghs most recent play, The Cripple of Inishmaan, is the first in a new trilogy of Aran Island plays.

also available from Bloomsbury Methuen Drama

The Beauty Queen of Leenane
The Cripple of Inishmaan
The Lonesome West
A Skull in Connemara

MCDONAGH PLAYS ONE

(The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, The Lonesome West)

Martin McDonagh

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a double provocation. It was intended to infuriate the violent Irish Republicans whose terror campaign in Northern Ireland was still in progress when the play was conceived in 1994. It is, indeed, an exercise in theatrical counter-terrorism, attempting to induce in its targets the same kind of outrage that they provoked in wider society. In this it is recognisably the work of a young man influenced by punk rock and anarchist and pacifist politics, kicking out at nationalist ideology with a ferocity equal to its subject. Martin McDonagh has recalled wanting to write a play that would make militant Irish nationalists want to shoot him. I was trying to write a play that would get me killed, McDonagh said. I had no real fear that I would be, because the paramilitaries never bothered with playwrights anyway, but if they were going to start, I wanted to write something that would put me top of the list. This is a political desire, but it is also an interrogation of the power of theatre. W. B. Yeats famously asked, in another period of Irish nationalist upheaval, Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot? McDonagh, with less heroic self-regard and more youthful mischief-making, was asking Could a play of mine send out certain men to shoot the author? He was, in other words, testing the limits of the theatre.

This is the other layer of provocation. When McDonagh conceived The Lieutenant, during an extraordinary period in 1994 when he also drafted The Pillowman, The Leenane Trilogy and The Cripple of Inishmaan, he was an unproduced playwright with doubts about the validity of the theatre as a contemporary form of storytelling. He had seen some plays, and the influences of Harold Pinter, David Mamet and John M. Synge on his work are obvious enough, but his main interest was in the cinema and, to a lesser extent, television. His desire to test the theatre, to see what weight of reality it could bear, is a key factor in the making of The Lieutenant. Hovering around it is a self-conscious desire to subject the theatrical form to a violent assault on its sensibilities and assumptions. McDonaghs method in the play is to bring self-conscious and patently farcical theatricality into deeply uncomfortable proximity to real human disasters. The initial setting is deliberately and deceptively familiar the interior of an Irish rural cottage, complete with a neatly embroidered Home Sweet Home. This is not so much a place as a theatrical trope, a signifier of the romantic West of Ireland play, well-known to international audiences. But the second scene is straight from a violent gangster movie a half-naked man hanging upside-down in an industrial warehouse, being tortured. The unsettling shift reminds us that we are in a play that is both fully aware of its own artifice and engaged with something real. This doubleness remains throughout, as jokes and horrors, trivia and tragedy continue to rub shoulders. The vivid violence that will be enacted later is prefigured in the opening scene as a comically grotesque discussion of the body of the dead cat, lumps of brain pure dribbling. Later, when Padraic tells Mairead that You cant go walking the streets of Ulster, dripping blood, now, she replies Sure who would notice?, as if the fake stage blood that spatters her pretty dress is somehow more real than the actual violence of the Northern Ireland conflict.

At times, the play revels in its own artificiality. The very dialogue draws comic energy from its synthetic nature, with a fusion of English words and Gaelic syntax making for something that sounds like badly translated German. Deliberately awkward words like validest make the speakers aware of their own speech. Padraic helpfully corrects Christys reference to the word splinter group by reminding him that Splinter groups two words. Extreme situations are translated into comically banal statements of the obvious: after your son tries to execute you, your opinions do change about him. Wonderfully weird compounds like cat covering, cat battering, boypreferers, cat polishers, cow blinding and mam trampling seem to be the result of some mad game of cutting words out of a dictionary and combining them at random. That sentence, says Davey at one point, makes no sense at all.

This reflexive use of language is mirrored in the nature of the plot. Its principal device the missing cat Wee Thomas is a McGuffin that purrs with the pleasure of its own ludicrous triviality. One sequence the polishing of the substitute cat in scene four is a double challenge to credulity: could Padraic actually believe that this is Wee Thomas and could we as an audience really believe that this is a real cat? Even when it is most extremely real with James being tortured in the second scene or with dead bodies being carved up on stage in the ninth the relentless banality of the dialogue, the refusal of the characters to register what is happening, contradicts that reality. Instead of the norm of theatre in which the characters speech is in synch with what the audience is seeing, there is a deliberately disruptive disjunction. The characters even come to question the validity of the whole exercise: Worse and worse and worse this story gets; I shouldnt be joking like that; has all this terror been for absolutely nothing? The result is comic, but it is also a constant reminder that this is only an exercise in play-acting. And yet, at the same time, there are frequent and sharp points of contact with an actual reality. The INLA (Irish National Liberation Army) was a real splinter group of the IRA, and its own fissiparous faction fights were almost as gruesomely violent as the action of the play. Real, and awful, events continually intrude. Mairead tries to entice Padraic to accompany her to see a film... about the Guildford Four Jim Sheridans