The Lieutenant of Inishmore

Reviewed by Holly Bartges

Little boys who love to scare little girls and gross out their parents with blood and gore would love The Lieutenant of Inishmore. They, of course, might not understand it, but then again, they probably wouldn’t care.

Steven Cole Hughes and Geoffrey Kent in a scene from Curious Theatre’s production of The Lieutenant of Inishmore.

Curious Theatre strikes it rich with Martin McDonagh’s play, The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Chip Walton ignites striking direction, a gangbuster cast engulfs, captivates and delivers, and a charming set covers the Irish landscape designed by M Rey Duran.

If you like blood and gore, you’ll love this production. McDonagh loves the visualization to literally strew guts across the stage for sheer shock value.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore features a cast of characters who are frightfully eccentric, angry, and caught up in the “him the I.R.A. wouldn’t let in because he was too mad.”

Growing up, living, and dying under the Irish Republican Army, torture and killing were their way of having a stab at “macabre-ish” fun. For some, that’s all they knew.

Lieutenant Padrioc, played with strength, vengeance, strict determination, shaded with sinister military discipline by Gene Gillette, gets his kicks out of torturing whoever he can, whenever he can.

When we first meet him, he has a culprit, James (Geoffrey Kent) hanging upside down, hands tied behind his back. Padrioc has just pulled off a couple of the poor man’s toenails insisting he actually did him a favor. He pulled off both toenails from the same foot so he’d only be limping on one foot not two. The poor man swings by his feet like a tetherball rope. The only thing missing is the pole. Given time, Padrioc probably would have thought about it if he hadn’t been interrupted by a phone call crumbling him to the ground in tears.

The only thing in the entire world Padrioc loves is his cat, Wee Thomas.

The phone call from his father, Donny (Anthony Powell) informs him Thomas is doing poorly. Thomas is doing poorly all right. Thomas is dead having been run over in the road.

Donny is beside himself, blaming, Davy (Matt Zambrano) for the unthinkable. Davy admits he liked the cat “not like most cats around. They’re full of themselves.”

Induced with humorous lines, Donny and Davy in a plain “undecorative” house, squabble in panic over Padrioc’s reaction.

A spoof on the stupidity of war? A commentary about jumping to conclusions before discerning the facts? An ironic illustration of pointing the trigger at the loss of the value of life? A romp over shooting for the sake of shooting, killing for the sake of killing? A portrait of how the rough and tough hard core maintain a soft spot for something, in this case, a cat? Or is The Lieutenant of Inishmore a diatribe over torture for the sake and fun of torture?

Sixteen-year old Mairead runs around in army garb, gun in hand, shooting at everything, anything, and everyone. Laura Jo Trexler gives a splendid performance as the tousled redhead who wants to be in the army so badly she can taste it. Not taken as seriously as she wants to be, she is described as “either a boy with lipstick or a girl with no boobs.”

Christy, (Steven Cole Hughes), Brendon, (Kent), and Joey, (Michael Morgan) represent a splinter group out for bloodied vengeance. They get it all right, although not exactly the way they planned.

The play slides a microscope under the political nature of polarities. If others don’t do what you want them to do, start a new group. Our culture is quite familiar with this “strategy of freedom” from political, to religious, to social structures.

Kathryn Gray did a superb job with the cast to ensure the thick Irish brogue wrapped itself snugly around the tongues of these mean spirited characters.

Davy makes the point no cat looks the same, or acts the same. This comes when Donny insists his young friend scour the area for a black cat to replace Wee Thomas. If a replacement could be found, perhaps Padrioc won’t skin them alive out of grief and anger. Herein lies an obvious production flaw.

The scrawny bloodied dead black cat Davy presents to Donny carries no resemblance to the gorgeous Wee Thomas, played by Thomas, who shows up at a crucial point in the “goried”, butchered onslaught. In spite of the incredible sterling job of the actors, Thomas steals the show looking at the right place at the right time playing his role to the hilt with his large penetrating yellow eyes.

Nothing funny about war, but so much of Ireland grew up only knowing war and the thrill of pulling a trigger.

So it played on Broadway. Any play can get on Broadway with enough money behind it, but all the money in the world can’t keep it on Broadway.

Although the uncouth rough necked characters admittingly dance between some very funny clever lines, there’s nothing funny about carving up corpses with blood shooting straight into the carver’s eye. Even if the squirting blood consists of chocolate syrup, peanut butter, and whatever. All too frequently, our violent world and bloodthirsty media gives us the real stuff right up front in our faces.

Everything about this production is exquisite. Anshuman Bhatia’s lighting design washes the set in mean, torturous cruelty. Annette Westerby’s costume design speaks directly to the well-developed and executed (no pun intended) characters. All of the characters are missing several floors on their elevators. If anything, the play speaks directly to the need of keeping guns out of the hands of the not so bright who are reduced to a 25-watt bulb where a 100-watt is required.

For all of the above-mentioned outstanding reasons, undoubtedly The Lieutenant of Inishmore will be a huge success for Curious. Some will go just for the exposure of the blood and gore, missing the entire point of the play. Others will find the blood and gore standing in the way of the point. I personally can thank Curious for producing it. No matter who produces it in the future, this is one play I never, ever want to see again. I don’t need to see dummies being carved before my eyes squirting a mass of red to grasp the insanity of war. In spite of the top-notch production with highly skilled actors, the only thing I was left with when the house lights came up was “Why?” As The HorseChart Theatre Company use to state: “you don’t need a sign to identify a Horse Chart. You just need the horse.” Likewise, you don’t need Halloween blood and guts staring you in the face to make a point.