The Lieutenant of Inishmore

Mark Taper Forum

Los Angeles

(213) 628-2772

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

****

“Martin McDonagh’s rip-roaring black comedy is a delicious mixture of harsh belly laughs and Grand Guignol effects,” said Jonas Schwartz in Theatermania.com. The Irish playwright’s 2001 masterwork is the tale of Padraic—a former IRA man and current sociopath—who will go to extreme lengths to protect the life of his cat, Wee Thomas, but has no compunctions about knifing a man who barely wronged him. Like film directors Quentin Tarantino and Sam Peckinpah, McDonagh brings the blood and gore, and matches them with dark humor. Wilson Milam, who has directed every incarnation of Inishmore since its debut, keeps sharpening its already razor-sharp edges: This time he’s brilliantly cast Chris Pine, of recent Star Trek fame, in the lead role.

“Pine is spookily, spectacularly good,” said Bob Verini in Variety. “His startling physical investment in Padraic’s insanity” is about as far from his onscreen Captain Kirk as one can get, and audience members who see this Inishmore will have the privilege of being present at “what promises to be a truly remarkable stage career.” Pine is complemented by the chilling Zoe Perry, who plays Padraic’s “sharpshooting lass, Mairead, renowned for shooting out cows’ eyes as a political statement.” The young pair delivers Inishmore’s “non sequitur jet-black humor” with fervent style, gradually bringing to the surface the play’s submerged raison d’être—“to expose global terrorism’s absurdity.”

Take note: Inishmore “isn’t a play for anyone squeamish about blood,” said Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. Nor is it a play for “cat fanciers”: Wee Thomas, like many a human in the play, suffers a grisly fate. Indeed, “the stage is inundated with so much carnage that Macbeth himself might wince in disgust.” Yet it’s nearly impossible not to enjoy this play’s “central irony of simple Irish country folk engaged in some fiendishly macabre ­activities.” Likewise, you probably won’t guffaw during all the limb-hacking, but it’s hard not to ­admire McDonagh’s tart, witty dialogue. Even “a flincher like me found himself tittering with open eyes” at McDonagh’s fiendish exercise in “theatrical blood sport.”