Bill Bray Introduces our next production:
I watched the veteran Jewish-American comedienne, Joan Rivers, on her umpteenth Farewell Tour on TV, in which she declared that there was nothing that would not benefit from being presented as a joke. She demonstrated this by making a legitimate joke from the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust.
Kurt Vonnegut, American veteran novelist, who, by incredible chance, survived with a group of fellow POWs the inferno that destroyed Dresden. His novel, Slaughterhouse Five was the incredible result. He declares in his autobiography, that laughter is the only way to deal with deadening tragedy and such an appalling experience. Is laughing at the horrors of life the way of coming to terms with it all?
Certainly playwright Martin McDonagh would agree with the war veterans and has made the remarkable play that is next in the season. The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a very dark, comic satire on the violent and unreasoning core of the IRA and its splinter groups. The leader, Padraic (pronounced Porick) might be considered psychotic but has a tender heart underneath his voracious appetite for defending Irish purity: He is destroyed when it turns out his kitty cat, Wee Thomas, has been murdered.
The play had its New York premiere, at an off-Broadway theatre, in February this year. In London, the play won the 2003 Olivier Award for Best New Comedy and was nominated for the London Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play following its production by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford and in the Barbican Pit, following which it transferred to the Garrick Theatre. The New York production is transferring to Broadway in May following its acclaimed reception off-Broadway.
Audiences have been horrified by the torture, gunplay and gore but they've also howled with laughter to witness the deadened central character's view that human losses are excusable, but pussycats are precious. Finally we get a most satisfying comic payoff and go home laughing but having experienced, as they say, the full gamut of human experience. Isn't this funny, frightening, challenging play what theatre should be about? Don't miss this important play by one of the younger generation of British writers. And, in spite of his name and Irish roots, Martin McDonagh was born and raised in South London.
He featured in the recent Oscar ceremony in Hollywood where he won a statuette for Best Short Film with Live Action. His agent happens to be Charlotte Mann, daughter of Geoff and Jane Mann, stalwarts of the GWT for many a year. Charlotte walked our boards herself as a child actor.
Director Andy Briggs writes:
The Lieutenant of Inishmore isn't your average comedy. In fact, very little about it could be described as average. Comedy doesn't get much blacker than this savage satire on terrorism. One reviewer described it as "Ballykissangel re-made by Sam Peckinpah" and another remarked "Father Ted meets Reservoir Dogs".
The black cat Wee Thomas has suddenly turned up dead, much to the distress of its psychopathic owner, Padraic portrayed by Richard Tame, a terrorist from the Republic, who makes sorties into Ulster and whose tactics are too extreme even for the extremist Irish National Liberation Army. When we first see Padraic he is hard at work administering an extreme pedicure to the local "herbalist", James played by Steve Hunt.
Bloody mayhem results as Padraic seeks out the murderer of his beloved pet, while his father (Dave Webster) and a loopy teenager named Davey (Toby Masson) desperately try to avoid the terrorist's wrath. Meanwhile a trio of less than bright INLA men (Peter Gray, Giles Wolfe and Dan Smith) attempt to plot Padraic's demise. "Skank Toby was the last straw ... not only to cut the nose off him, all well and good ... but to then feed it to his cocker spaniel and choked himself to death on it." Padraic's offence is "over-enthusiasm".
Only one person on the island of Inishmore (a real place in Galway Bay) is unafraid of Padraic: a tom-boy, top-shot with an air gun, by the name of Mairead, played by Fiona McGahren, who has a unique way of bringing Ireland's meat trade to its knees.
Lieutenant of Inishmore is a hysterically funny play with a deadly serious message running through it. And in light of events in recent years surely we must agree with that message, that violent means have long overtaken legitimate ends.
The Lieutenant Of Inishmore is not suitable for children.
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