Aidan on ten pints a night to play Mad Padraic!
Brace yourself. There will be blood. Ten pints of it (fake) for every performance of Martin McDonagh’s noir comic masterpiece The Lieutenant Of Inishmore when it runs at the Noel coward Theatre from June 23.
The original production was turned down by the likes of the National Theatre because The Troubles in Ireland were still so fresh. Plus, cats die. People are tortured. The royal Shakespeare company stepped in and opened the play in Stratford-upon-avon in 2001.
Director Michael Grandage, who’s directing an ensemble led by Poldark actor aidan Turner, nodded towards what looked like a pile of dismembered limbs. ‘Under that tarpaulin are body parts,’ he said, grimly. He laughed when he saw my shocked (fake) response.
The flesh- coloured and bloodied chopped-up bodies weren’t real. But they looked real enough for McDonagh’s play about Padraic (known as Mad Padraic), an Irish terrorist so bonkers the Ira won’t let him join.
He goes ballistic when his companion of 15 years, a black cat known as Wee Thomas, is found in the road with brain injuries. I saw the original London and Broadway productions over a decade ago, but it was great to watch the opening scene where Denis conway, as Padraic’s dad, and chris Walley (who just won an award for his performance in TV’s Young Offenders) as Davey, discuss Wee Thomas’s misfortune — and how to break the news to Padraic.
Grandage and cast members noted that the world view of terrorism had changed. Irishman Turner said: ‘In the eighties and Nineties we’d be terrified driving through areas boarded-up because of terrorist activity. But it was normality, everyday for the locals.’ It was the ‘banality’ of the violence (a phrase that knocked about all afternoon) he found most shocking.
conway said the farce-like qualities of the play were a challenge to actors, in that the parts had to be played ‘straight, with a wink’. He added that the ‘audience should be laughing while you’re crying . . . and they have to believe that you’re crying’.
Peaky Blinders’ star charlie Murphy, the only woman in the cast (Mairead, a sharpshooter, who can hit a cow’s eye at 600 yards) echoed that sentiment.
When I saw her holding an air pistol close to Turner’s precious parts, for a split second I feared for his manhood. But she said she knows her way around arms very well, thanks to combat training for various roles.
Turner unholstered two guns to show he, too, knew what he was doing with weapons. conviction on all fronts.
No real animals were harmed in the making of the play, by the way. There is one real cat and an understudy. all other cats are fake. animatronics.
They were a fun cast, and they confirmed that they’ve enjoyed the craic. I was very convinced of that.