THEATER - "The Lieutenant of Inishmore"

Bottom line for all the blokes: "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" is feckin’ stupid. For those who didn't already know, violence--at least according to the playwright, Martin McDonagh--is pretty stupid. For everyone else, "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" is pretty stupid, a play that has buckets of blood to its name and nothing else (although, to its credit, it has many, many gallons worth).

There are better bloody farces, (like "The Revenger's Tragedy") and stronger sanguine satires (like McDonagh's own "The Pillowman"). "The Lieutenant of Inishmore," once it has exhausted a rather restrained mockery of an alternately titled "cat-braining" Irish terrorist organization, has nowhere to go but down, and it does--comedy for the lowest common denominator. The performances are decent, but the characters have few reversals, are all fairly bloodless, and are ultimately overwhelmed by the inevitable whirlwind of death (read: an all too-long climax).

The premise itself isn't half-bad: Padraic (David Wilmot) is both a terrorist and a lunatic (McDonagh suggests that to be one, is to be the other), and he threatens to become grossly unhinged after his only friend dies. His father, Donny (Peter Gerety) quickly realizes that the only way to save his life, and that of Davey (Domhnall Gleeson), the innocent bystander who found the body, is to cover up the death of poor Wee Thomas, who is, by the way, a cat.

There's a great friendship of circumstance (think Laurel and Hardy) in the works here, and for all the crude cursing and dark humor, there are some very fine, bright moments. Somewhere during the intermission (and periodically before that), all that delightful sin is corrupted, and what returns to the stage for the second act is nothing more than a one-dimensional feat of stagecraft. The cartoon violence that follows--enough blood on the floor to be a slip-'n'-slide--is just laughter for shock's sake. We erudite theatergoers laugh because we, of course, would never be so boorish, so ill-mannered.

“Lieutenant of Inishmore" made me sick: not from the violence (though it's not for the queasy) but from feeling so cheated. All the superficial jokes and killer sight gags (if you consider decapitated body parts a sight gag) make for an ultimately empty show. This play, like many of the characters, becomes a bloody mess. With all the winking asides and coy jokes to the audience that this is all just a bit too much (and ultimately, all for naught) I think McDonagh knows this, too. “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” serves only as a momentary catharsis, and once the lights go up, it will leave you cold as a corpse.