Playhouse Tuesdays: The Lieutenant of Irishmore

by erica wachs

I like to think of myself as having read and seen a lot of plays in my lifetime. I’ve seen everything from the classic final moments of Act I of Wicked, with Elphaba legitimately in flight over a stage. I’ve read about Benjamin Franklin having a sexual word-pun off with Don Juan (a new Paula Vogel show entitled Don Juan Comes Home from the War). I’ve even seen a production of Hamlet where the gloomy prince himself starts to rap Eminem’s “I’m Not Afraid” during a scene transition. And yet, none of my prior experiences with theater could prepare me for the brilliantly written The Lieutenant of Inishmore’s near classic line, where a terrorist takes a razor to his prisoner’s face and says, “Be picking your nipple I say!”

In a word, this play is strange. Reading it, be prepared for controversy, blood-and-guts, the murder of not one, but two cats, and (perhaps most surprisingly?) a strong female lead (that was me invoking irony to make a feminist statement. Don’t worry, the rest of the piece is not about feminism, but I had to get that one out there. Take that theater world!). Think big, think Django, think murder and characters and blood of epic proportions. This play, written by Martin McDonagh, is a part of a trilogy that takes a satirical look at Northern Irish Terrorism. This is McDonagh’s most controversial play for many, many reasons (that I won’t list here, but if you’re interested, you should buy a student edition copy of the play which gives a fantastic 30 page introduction and commentary on the work). A simple plot: Davey brings a dead cat to Donny, the father of Padraic, wondering how they’re going to tell Padraic abou the death of his one true friend in the world, his cat, Wee Thomas. Donny fears Padraic, for he is so extreme that even the IRA kicked him out, and he is now working for the INLA, another Irish terrorism group. It turns out that the dead cat was a way to lure Padraic back to Inishmore, so that other members of his group (Christy, Brendan and Joey) can murder him for his extreme ways. Meanwhile, Davey’s sister Mairead only wants to join the INLA, and flirt with Padraic. What results is the death of Mairead’s cat, the three INLA men, and even Padraic.

This play has so much to talk about, I could devote a separate playwriting blog to it. I’ll get to my main point in a moment, but I briefly want to discuss the way the play is written, which is written in a cartoonish version of Hiberno-English (the technical term for the type of English spoken in Ireland). This language is perhaps the most defining stylistically characteristic element of the show, and has sparked tons of controversy over whether McDonagh is an Irish playwright satirizing his people, or an English playwright exploiting and teasing the ways of their drunken neighbors. The language is gritty, off-putting, and at times, excessively hilarious when read with the accents in mind. It perfectly mirrors the content of the show.

What I want to focus on is the role that something as simple as a cat can play in a show like this. There are actually three cats in this play: the initially dead Wee Thomas, Mairead’s cat Sir Roger, and at the end of the show, the real Wee Thomas, who comes crawling back to a house full of hacked up bodies, his owner dead, and a dumbstruck Davey and Donny. Padraic is described as a ruthless terrorist, who would stop at absolutely nothing to kill for what he believes is right. He also likens himself to a nice guy (which is why he lets his prisoner, James, choose the nipple he wants cut off instead of picking himself), much to the disagreement of everyone around him. Mairead is equally horrific, and has no qualms about shooting eyes out of cows for a political protest, or even contemplating shooting her brother. And yet, the moment Padraic thinks Wee Thomas is in trouble, he rushes home to take care of his only friend in the world. When Mairead finds out that Padraic killed her cat, Sir Roger (he is upset that the decoy cat Davey and Donny use to trick him isn’t Wee Thomas), she barely hesitates in her decision to murder Padraic. Finally, when the real Wee Thomas returns at the end of the show, Davey and Donny contemplate killing it, before showing Mercy to the cat, and feeding it some Frosties. This brings up many interesting issues. With Padraic, it is the amount of sympathy humans are capable of conjuring, with Mairead, it brings up the idea of animal instinct and how far someone is able to go, and with Davey and Donny, it sheds some light on human mercy. (I won’t talk about them, but even the INLA cronies are upset that joining the terrorism business now includes murdering cats.)

Arguably, the only thing that makes Padraic human rather than a caricature is his love for his cat. He wouldn’t think twice about killing his father, but has a very moving monologue in the middle of the show about Wee Thomas:

“Full of memories of Wee Thomas this house is. How asleep in me arms he’d fall, the armchair there. Aye, and purr and yawn. How he’d pooh in a corner when you were drunk and you’d forget to let him out, and he’d look embarrassed the next day then, as if it was his fault, the poor lamb. How in through the hole in the wall there he’d come, after a two-day bender chasing skirt the length of the island, and pulling your hair out for fear something had happened to him you’d be, and him prancing in then like ‘What was all the fuss about? I was off getting me end away.’ (Pause.) He won’t be prancing in today.”

He could be moments away from shooting his own father in the head, but in this moment, Padraic becomes so incredibly human. If anyone reading has a pet, they know the love that surrounds your pet, the embarrassment your pet has when you forget to let them out, and the feeling of devoting yourself so completely to this furry thing that can’t even talk back. Padraic has the capacity to evoke sympathy from the audience—which is frightening, when you think how seamlessly McDonagh does it, and how much we dislike Padraic as a character. Meanwhile, Mairead is truly the animal instincts inside of us. She is better at killing and terrorism than Padraic is. Her position in the play, I think, is to demonstrate that sometimes, we as people are more like animals than harmless cats such as Wee Thomas and Sir Roger are. Those cats didn’t deserve to die, but Padraic, arguably, didn’t have to either. Finally, Davey and Donny allowing Wee Thomas to live at the play’s end is perhaps a note of hope to end the play with, the only demonstration of human mercy in the entire play. These are all ideas we wrestle with in our daily lives, but on much smaller scales. Sometimes, it takes an exaggeration of people, places, and things to find the miniscule commonalities that connect us as people.

So yes, four people die over two cats, or really, even, one cat. And yet, these animals are so much more than props. They are characters, perhaps, even more vital to the story than Padraic, Mairead, and the rest of the cast. McDonagh could have written any version of any crazy terrorist-related characters he wanted to, but he would have no story if it were not for the initial stage direction that reads: “A couple of armchairs near the back wall and a table centre, on which, as the play begins, lies a dead black cat, its head half-missing…”

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#ericawachs #playhousetuesdays