The Lieutenant of Inishmore

Synopsis

Who knocked 'Mad Padraic's' cat over on a lonely road on the island of Inishmore, and was it an accident? He'll want to know when he gets back from a stint of torture and chip shop bombing in Northern Ireland: he loves that cat more than life itself. A wild, satirical, black farce.

Our Review:

27 June 2002

Though The Lieutenant of Inishmore has moved from the close-up intimacy of the RSC's Other Place and Barbican Pit to a more long-range West End house, the horrors are undiminished in Martin McDonagh's piece of theatrical Tarantino.

There have been violent plays before, to be sure, but never before with quite the same splatter quotient as so shamelessly served up here. If anything, the effect is now magnified: the distance of the proscenium arch now makes it even more gruesome, because it looks even more realistic from a little further away.

Wilson Milam's almost entirely re-cast production is scintillatingly rendered in all its ghoulish terror by a company who variously splatter, or are splattered, all over the scenery. Francis O'Connor's rural cottage setting becomes a veritable little shop of horrors in the process; and there's no more extraordinary sight on the London stage than the one of Trevor Cooper (the sole holder-over from the original) an...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com - 25 October 2002:

Beautifully produced. It is the best show I have seen since Kathleen Turner in 'The Graduate'. London has not seen as well written as play for many years. It will be missed when it closes next month....

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