The Lieutenant of Inishmore by Martin McDonagh

I wanted something quick and easy after struggling to pin down time to get through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (which isn’t long!) during the middle of July, so I picked up a copy of a play I hadn’t read as I headed out for two days of loooooong days working at events.

I had to get up extremely early in order to make it to Paddington on a Friday morning, with delays on the Windrush line meaning my very early start was almost for nothing. Panting, sweating and already over-tired and under-caffeinated, I made it to my train heading West with moments to spare, then sat on a train for an hour anxiously resetting my Maps app as I tried to confirm I was still on schedule to get to the day’s event using an onwards minicab from Swindon station, as it was my first day working with a new company.

I was on time, it was fine (I’d baked in so much wiggle room that even though I was dropped off at the entirely incorrect side of a very large and fully fenced site, I was able to walk around with (some) time to spare), and then at the end of the day (after a fascinating car share back to Swindon station with some young lads where I heard some great contemporary hip-hop I managed to make sure I didn’t comment on enjoying so as not to ruin it for them), I was in a grim Basingstoke motel for the night, before a 17-hour day kicking off the following morning.

Again, I spent that train ride anxiously route-planning rather than reading, but after a deeply depressing Sainsbury’s Local-sourced cold evening meal (a punnet of blueberries, a Ritter Sport, two of those big cans of weirdly fruit flavoured sparkling waters (which I LOVE), a vegan wrap and some disgusting olives (I say “deeply depressing”, which it is, but I would happily have that meal again today and all I’d change would be the olives)) I sat, unflatteringly in nothing but my rank, loose skin and and some slightly too loose pants (I need to go underwear shopping) and read half of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Martin McDonagh’s 2001 hit play, one of the last ones he wrote before his Oscar-winning short film, Six Shooter, took him to stratospheric Hollywood heights. And that’s meant sneeringly, a bit.

Then, not the following day as I was working for 17 hours, but the day after that as I finally travelled back to South London and then to Watford for a sparsely-attended run through of my show Bald Personality Disorder as part of the Watford Fringe (tickets available for Camden show in August here), I read through the second half of this play at some point (I don’t remember when (it’s several days later as I type)).

It’s a play, yes, and it’s an exceptionally violent one (I mean, maybe not if you’re comparing it to Titus Andronicus or The Massacre At Paris but generally, for sure).

It opens with a dead cat brought onto the stage with its brains visible to the audience, and by the end, multiple people have been blinded, another cat has been shot to death at close range, multiple people have been tortured in different ways, four people have been effectively executed by gunfire and these bodies have been dismembered onstage with hammers taken to their skulls and faces in order to make identification harder if/when these violently dispatched bodies are ever found.

Offstage, multiple bombings and murders have taken place, too, with many of them unsanctioned and considered to be unhelpful in the pursuit of Irish Re-Unification. Because this is a play about the INLA, a hyper violent Irish Republican paramilitary group comprised of people too blood-hungry, mean and slapdash to be permitted as members of the IRA.

The Lieutenant of the title is a member of this group, who is heading back to his hometown on Inishmore (one of the Aran islands on the West Coast of Ireland) after he is told his cat is very unwell (the cat – as mentioned above – is actually already dead before the narrative starts). Unfortunately for him, also travelling to Inishmore are three other members of the INLA who have decided that the lieutenant is too violent (especially towards drug dealers who give the organisation money, though the friendly fire of non-combatants in his terrorist attacks too isn’t great, though definitely a secondary issue) and too independently-minded to be able to continue, and they plan to ambush him and kill him, far away from their usual areas of operation.

As with all of these kinds of things, obviously, stuff goes sideways.

Seemingly innocent young people prove to be decisive and dangerous, the people who seem in control are not, and as more blood and bone and viscera, both human and cat, litters the stage, bon mots and gags fly around in the way you’d also expect.

It’s fun, yes, but it doesn’t necessarily feel like it has much heft to it – intellectually or emotionally – compared to much of McDonagh’s other works.

It’s more of a violent dark comedy set within the world of internally fracturing paramilitary organisations rather than it is a definitive and potent piece of writing about violent struggle against colonialist oppression.

The violence is spectacle and special effect, stage violence for the sake of stage violence, and as enjoyable and visceral as this play is, it doesn’t feel like it echoes with complex nuances of the realities of the human condition, as does the better work of Martin McDonagh.

This isn’t as deep and dense as his earlier plays or his best films, though it shares similar settings and/or similar attitudes towards violence of those pieces.

He would settle into writing deeply complex yet violent characters very soon, and though I enjoyed this, I didn’t love love love it, but in no way did it put me off reading more of McDonagh’s plays when fall into my lap, and nor did they put me off my vague plans to watch his new film when it’s released later this year.

An enjoyable read, yes, but ultimately it felt lighter and frothier than I’d been hoping for.