Poldark’s wild ride in the West End
SHOW OF THE WEEK
The Lieutenant Of Inishmore Noël Coward Theatre, London Until Sep 8, 1hr 50mins ★★★★★
Aidan Turner is so well known as Poldark, it’s good to see him in a role a million miles from the Cornish hero. Here he plays a psychopathic Irish Republican cat-lover in this hilarious, jet-black (and ketchupred) farce from Martin McDonagh. One or two fans looked askance at this disgusting splatter comedy. Most of us rode a big rolling wave of laughter.
The action is set in 1993. We meet Mad Pádraic (Turner) while he’s cheerfully pulling the toenails out of a local drug dealer. When he learns that his beloved cat back home is poorly, he downs tools and sets off for Inishmore to cuddle his best and only friend. But ‘Wee Thomas’ is worse than poorly. He’s very deceased indeed, with a gaping red hole where his brain once was. Pádraic thinks nothing of blowing up kids in chip shops. But he so loves his cat that even his dad is too terrified to tell him it’s dead. So he and a local lad – the presumed author of the animal’s demise – kidnap a stray ginger tom and paint it black with boot polish in the hope that Pádraic won’t notice the difference. It doesn’t work. The plot is further thickened when a trio of IRA men comes look-
ing for Pádraic to settle a score.
McDonagh – who wrote and directed the award-winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – has a gift for making you laugh despite yourself. And Michael Grandage’s production is honed to perfection. It comes with the best stage shoot-out I’ve seen, and the cast handles the cod Oirish dialogue effortlessly. ‘Is it happy cats or an Ireland free we’re after?’ asks one fella as the moggie chatter distracts from the business of Republican terror.
McDonagh links the terrorists’ sentimentality with their mindless violence to brilliant comic effect. By the end, there’s an absurd abattoir of body parts on Christopher Oram’s crimson-spattered cottage set.
‘It’s incidents like this that does put tourists off Ireland,’ says one character in a moment of delicious understatement.
Dubliner Turner, biceps flexing as he waves about a pair of guns, is truly wild-eyed. There’s fine support, too: from Chris Walley as Davey, a young heavy-metal fan caught catnapping; from Charlie Murphy as his mad Republican sister Máiréad, who can shoot out a cow’s eyes at 60 yards; and from Denis Conway, a delight as Pádraic’s deadpan father Donny.
But the real star here is the writing – a rich, bold stew that gleefully mixes comedy with horror and put me, for one, in a terrifically good mood.
‘The real star is the writing – a rich, bold stew that mixes comedy with horror’