A brutal and bloody hilarious ‘Lieutenant’ at San Jose Stage
It’s arguably Martin McDonagh’s goriest and funniest black comedy
Violence is seldom far away in a Martin McDonagh play, but even by the London-born Irish playwright’s standards, “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” is a gruesomely bloody comedy.
Opening San Jose Stage’s 36th season, “Lieutenant” starts with someone holding the nearly pulped corpse of a cat and just gets gorier from there until it makes “Titus Andronicus” (or indeed most slasher films) look positively demure. Standoffs with multiple guns to multiple heads are a fairly regular occurrence and one of the more civilized things that happen in the play. It’s also terribly funny, like some perverse mashup of Quentin Tarantino and John Millington Synge.
San Jose Stage clearly has some affinity for McDonagh’s material, having previously produced his “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” “A Skull in Connemara,” “The Lonesome West” and “The Pillowman.” (McDonagh is also writer-director of the films “In Bruges,” “Seven Psychopaths” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”)
Set in 1993 on Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland’s County Galway (the region that inspired most of his early plays), “Lieutenant” opens with two people very upset over the death of the aforementioned cat. The main thing is, the cat belongs to “Mad Padraic,” a bloodyminded hometown lad who was rejected by the Irish Republican Army for being too violent and is now off bombing chip shops and torturing people in Northern Ireland as part of splinter group the Irish National Liberation Army.
Never mind that one of these people scrambling to cover up the cat’s death is Padraic’s own dad — nobody wants to be the one to tell a psychotic killer his cat and “only friend in the world” is dead.
Rob August has a nicely unnerving cocksure swagger as the cold-bloodedly cruel Padraic, whom we first meet while he’s cheerfully torturing a guy (Andy Cooperfauss, hanging upside down and amusingly affable under the circumstances). Artistic director Randall King’s low-key Donny, Padriac’s father, and Trevor March’s agitated young Davey make a comically dimwitted pair of co-conspirators in an inept cat cover-up.
Carley Herlihy is fiercely volatile as Davey’s sister Mairead, a hair-trigger pop-gun sniper and teenage true believer in the rebel cause. John Flanagan has a sinister leer as a one-eyed lurking stranger in town, having funny squabbles with a jittery compatriot played by Loki Miller and a trivially nitpicking one portrayed by Brendan Quirk.
It starts off gruesome and gets only more so, but the humor and Grand Guignol are well mixed in this production directed by Joshua Marx, who recently acted in San Jose Stage’s production of Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” alongside King and August.
It’s hard to talk too much about the gore without giving much away, but suffice it to say prop and blood designer Tunuviel Luv and the special effects team of Ashley Garlick and Bill Vujevich had their work cut out for them and did an amazing job whipping up some nightmarishly realistic carnage. (Perhaps mercifully, the cats are some of the less realistic props in the mix.) Christopher Fitzer’s cozy set of a small stone cottage kitchen just makes it all feel more up close and personal.
“Worse and worse and worse this story gets,” Davey says, and he’s not kidding. But it’s in its extremes that the play reaches its greatest moments of hilarity, which both provide welcome emotional release from the macabre imagery and maybe make you feel a little perverse for laughing.