Aidan Turner inspires as the Lieutenant of Inishmore
The Lieutenant of Inishmore Noël Coward Theatre
They should station paramedics with stretchers in the foyer. Not so much because this fearless, savagely funny satire on Irish Republican terrorism, first staged by the RSC in 2001, is the bloodiest play to have flowed from the pen of Martin Mcdonagh to date. But because it stars Aidan Turner.
As if the summer wasn’t steamy enough, Poldark’s treading the boards. Are people excited? Put it this way – when the 35-year-old heart-throb makes his entrance, there’s an explosion of applause. The Lieutenant of Inishmore is an inspired choice for the West End debut of this dashing Irishman – who has thus far only treated his native Dublin to displays of his theatrical abilities.
It plays to Turner’s physical prowess and natural air of command. Most strikingly, it cuts against the grain of expectation: untamed and wilful as Ross Poldark is, he fights the good fight, lends a hand on the land. By contrast, Padraic, anti-hero of this gleeful comedy of escalating retribution, is a full-on psycho, so hardened by his battle for a free Ireland that even the IRA won’t take him.
His one weak spot is his moggy Wee Thomas, adored as if it was the living embodiment of the Emerald Isle. And therein lies much bitter mirth at the expense of patriotic sentimentality.
We first see the star in a scene that’s almost pure Tarantino: lashings of nastiness drenched in black humour. The Irish National Liberation Army “second-lieutenant” (“in his own brain if nowhere else,” it’s said of him back home on the west-coast Aran island of Inishmore) is torturing a suspected drug-dealer strung upside down in a Northern Irish warehouse. The audience, still recovering from the delight of seeing Turner in the flesh, emit an uncomfortable number of laughs as the reprobate struts around his writhing victim.
But that’s arguably the bonus of Michael Grandage’s polished revival – all that animal magnetism is used to complicate our response. If we take too lightly this monster’s flip love of atrocity, then the savage joke is on us.
As we discover, Turner, tousled, bearded, mean and brooding, looks hot in a blood-spattered white T-shirt (for the record, it never comes off – that killer torso remains concealed).
Turner’s intense stare carries a surprising amount of charge away from the small-screen. What’s more of a revelation, though, is his capacity to turn on a sixpence between hardman and crybaby – the deadpan effect at once comical and disquieting.
His face first crumples in distress when he receives a call telling him that Wee Thomas is poorly; in fact, the black cat appears to have been run over while in the care of Padraic’s aged da Donny, with a hapless local eejit called Davey implicated too; the pair hatch a bonkers plan to smear a ginger substitute with boot-polish.
As Padraic coolly heads home to run amok in a tumbledown kitchen (set by Christopher Oram), the tension mounts, the plot thickens and Mcdonagh’s inventively oddball dialogue achieves its fecund (and “fecking”-crammed) zenith.
He may have produced more sophisticated plays since this one, but has he concocted anything more shocking, silly, and audacious than the clinch he engineers in the climactic shoot-out?
Silhouetted against his father’s rustic doorway, Padraic caresses his doting, doolally local acolyte – Charlie Murphy’s Mairead – while three Republican rivals (and imminent victims), blinded by the airgunslinging girl, send bullets frantically flying in every direction but the right one.
“Lucky her,” a woman behind me murmured in spontaneous envy.