The Lieutenant of Inishmore
I feel bad that it’s a few days after opening night that I’m finally getting around to reviewing ‘The Lieutenant of Inishmore,’ but events have just been getting in the way - and that bus strike is really starting to switch me into hibernation mode. I wanted to be at Cafe Nostalgica tonight, for the inaugural The New Stalgica, but it was a really long way to go on a bike in the snow... I hope it went really well. Anyway, I've been stuck at home a lot, but for some reason I've also had my brain in standby. Ah well, better late than never. And if you haven't seen it, what are you waiting for? It runs till January 24th.
When a line like, “Oh, come in lads, I’m just in the middle of killing me dad,” makes me break out into unwilling laughter, apparently, John Kelly (the director of ‘The Lieutenant of Inishmore,’ SevenThirty Productions, at the Gladstone until January 24th) has gotten the effect he was looking for.
'The Lieutenant of Inishmore’ is a violent play. It’s a play with blood all over the stage (literally), exploded cats (literally), and severed body parts (literally.) And we were all warned. Press releases and radio spots on Opening Day made a point of reminding the audience that if this play didn’t make you wince at least once, you should seek professional help. That’s probably true. But it’s also really funny, in the sort of way that has you asking yourself, “oh my god, should I be laughing at this?”
The program defnitely has its hints of … I’d have to say ‘glee’ about the bloodiness of the play. “Every effort will be made to keep blood from flowing into the seating area”… you might as well sell the front row seats as ‘splash zone’ for twice the admission price, the way Evil Dead: The Musical did. There are people I would not recommend this play to. One of my very close friends hates any film in which there are bodies that get cut up in any way at all; I wouldn’t be the first to tell her she should come to this show. I learned my lesson when I showed her Ginger Snaps.Reviews of the New York production were what had me interested – aside from my personal love of modern Irish theatre (and hooray, SevenThirty Productions will be doing more Irish! I want to put in my request for Brian Friel’s ‘Translations.’) But they hadn’t prepared me, somehow, for how damn funny it is. The play is set along the west coast of Ireland, on the island of Inishmore. As the play opens, Donny (Scott Florence) and Davey (Zach Counsil) are contemplating the sorry remains of a dead cat – Wee Thomas, who Davey has just found on the road outside with his brains bashed out. Their main concern is not so much that the cat is dead, as that the cat’s owner, Donny’s psychotic terrorist son Padraic (Rory Lavelle), who loves the cat to distraction, will eventually find out that it is dead, and quite possibly kill them both in very nasty ways. When you first see Padraic, you get an idea of some of the ways, in a particularly distressing (and – don’t judge me – hilarious) scene in which he’s hung a pot dealer up by his feet and done some fairly unspeakable things to him. (Yes, this is the scene in which I winced.) I was also really impressed by Steve Martin, who played the pot dealer, and his ability to play the scene hanging upside down for ten minutes (my companion timed it.)
There are, of course, complications beyond Padraic’s furious return to Inishmore and Donny and Davey’s hapless and half-drunken attempts to hide Wee Thomas’s death from him: namely, Davey’s teenaged sister Mairead (Kate Smith, sporting a brilliant tricolour haircut), who belts out patriotic songs, blinds the local cattle with her air rifle – “to strike a blow against the beef industry … sure who’s going to buy a blind cow?” – and thinks of the I.R.A. (or, specifically, Padraic’s Marxist offshoot group, the I.N.L.A.) the way most sixteen-year-olds think of pop stars; and three ex-compatriots of Padraic’s (Richard Gélinas, Brenhan McKibben and David Whiteley) who are determined to get even with him for splitting with them and appointing himself a ‘second lieutenant’ in his own splinter group. Yes, they all wind up, eventually, in Donny’s cottage. And then a lot of people die.Mairead’s infatuation with Padraic, and with the nationalist cause, seems to me to be the thematic centre of the play: she has no real reason for violence. For her it is an end in its own. She dreams, wide-eyed, of going off to the North to fight for freedom, but it’s just an excuse to carry a gun, to have power, and to do violence. And she’s good at it: arguably the most competent killer in the lot, and for absolutely no personal reason. (She has as much connection to the I.R.A. as a modern sixteen-year-old from Rivière-du-Loup would with the F.L.Q.) The violence in this play, like her skill at shooting out the eyes of the local cows, is pointless and pathetic, which runs underneath the blood-gushing humor of it in a sort of sobering undercurrent that leaves you most disturbed by the image of Mairead walking out the door at the end, barefoot in a pink dress and carrying a gun, singing her patriot anthems.
Kate Smith, as Mairead, was impressive. She managed to be gawky and threatening at once. In her teenaged infatuation with the cause and her determined pursuit of Padraic – even in her furious airgunning of her brother’s bicycle – she was oddly charming, in a gun-toting, cow-blinding kind of way … and in the moment when she turns on Padraic and the audience realizes just how crazy she is, she controlled the stage. She was frightening.You could possibly perform this play with all the bloody realism of a Tarantino film, where the verbal humor was even more sublimated in the brutality: but it would be exhausting to watch, and a lot harder to laugh at without being really worried about your own mental health. (And, as the program introduction mentions quite rightly, comparisons with Tarantino don’t really work: Tarantino’s violence is crafted and artistic, while this violence is deliberately clumsy and misguided and sad.) This production was leavened by some clowning, and hilarious choreography, particularly with the three I.N.L.A. thugs, Christy, Brendan and Joey, who also all dress alike in Aran sweaters and cargo pants with green, white, or orange kerchiefs, and who spend a whole lot of time pointing guns at each other in a sort of playground “I know you are but what am I?” attitude.
There’s a lot of well-timed physical humor in this production, although most of the work is done by the dialogue (timing, though, is everything, even with great dialogue, and this cast pulled off the timing really well.) From the opening scene, when the corpse of the cat is alternately prodded, stroked, gesticulated with, tossed around, and otherwise mauled, I found myself laughing out loud and then furtively checking to see if anyone else in the audience was laughing, or if they thought I was sick. (The cats were mostly mechanical, and not particularly convincing, but that’s probably a good thing considering what happens to them.)I’ve said before how much I’ve enjoyed Zach Counsil’s work in other shows, and he didn’t disappoint in this one – sulky and stupid and hapless, with a ridiculous blond wig and a great sense of what was happening on the stage around him and how to direct attention where it was needed. He headed up the special effects team, as well, for which I commend him. There were a lot of jets of blood, cat brains, and body parts to put together and get to work, and if a couple of the effects didn’t quite go off on opening night (an intended cat-shooting did kind of fizzle), I’ll bet they will in future shows. He also played well off Scott Florence as Donny, who had a strikingly consistent body language made up of curves and cringes that conveyed his character fluently.
Rory Lavelle, playing Padraic, stuck me, at first, as not quite as frightening as he could be, but then I’m not sure in retrospect whether the character should be frightening or pathetic. It’s a difficult mixture to get right, and regardless, Lavelle was certainly a lot of fun to watch. His timing was particularly good, and the genial tone he struck while pulling out the toenails of James the pot dealer, and then advising him to get them looked at – “The last thing you’d want is for them to get septic” – was one of the first things to get me laughing, and then looking around for other people’s reactions.It was the first night, which may have been why the set changes took a little bit longer than you’d want them to. There wasn’t much to change – aside from the final scene, which did require quite a few bodies to be strewn around the stage, and liberal lashings of blood to be poured over the floor. The only piece of scenery was the backdrop, suggesting a rather overly large and roomy cottage, which was fine – I have faith in suspension of disbelief – although it was so detailed as a cottage that when pressed into double duty as a warehouse or a back yard or a ferry dock it almost became intrusive. But, a more minimal set would have been too serious for the tone the production was setting, and it would have been overkill to create full blown sets for all four different locations.
It was, in a way, a relief, too, to be subtly reminded – by the set, which you realize halfway through the show is all in orange, white, and green, or by the matching costumes of the three I.N.L.A. thugs, or by the sheer over-the-top callous brutality – that this is not real. As I said, if this had been played as a deadly serious black comedy it would have been blacker than black, and the laughter would have been too uncomfortable and the cringes too genuine. As it is, it managed to walk the line between being very funny, and also having something serious to say. Half of the horror in the show, and all of the humor, is in how senseless and ludicrous all the bloodshed is.
It's on at the new Gladstone (the ex-GCTC building), which is completely worth checking out if you haven't seen what they've done with the place, for another week and a half. Unless you're very squeamish, or love cats inordinately, I'd say you should check it out.
Posted by Kathryn Hunt
at 11:27 PM EST
Updated: Monday, 12 January 2009 11:57 PM EST
