All sense of parody has left the building
Emer O’Kelly sees a massively impressive piece of direction in a McDonagh revival
‘The audience can identify with some real emotion’
The Cripple of Inishmaan
MARTIN The Cripple of Inishmaan was premiered at the National Theatre in London in 1998, where it was played as pastiche. The production followed the premiere two years earlier of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, on which McDonagh’s theatrical reputation rests most strongly.
That premiere was in Galway where dazzled audiences (puzzlingly) swallowed the promotion of McDonagh and his work as “Irish”. To me, it was obviously the work of a (sneering) outsider... not that there isn’t plenty to sneer at in Irish society, as in most societies. But this had no core to it.
I was eventually proved right on two grounds: McDonagh is English (a Londoner) and also admitted a long time ago that he dislikes theatre and never goes. The latter may explain what seems like contemptuous manipulation of audiences. His natural milieu seems to be film, and he has been inordinately successful there; good luck to him.
The new Gaiety in-house production of The Cripple of Inishmaan is the fourth I have seen of the play, and arguably the best — certainly far better than the National’s. Director Andrew Flynn has taken the text and played it down, while leaving it intact. And he has reined in his eye-blinkingly impressive cast so that there is almost no element of caricature left: you actually believe this is only slightly enlarged reality. And instead of sniggering, the audience can identify with some real emotion.
The tale of the seriously lame and slightly “simple” Billy, living with two spinster “aunties” on Inishmaan while Robert O’Flaherty films Man of Aran on neighbouring Inis Morin the year 1934, is played out against a giant projection of the actual film, with Owen MacCarthaigh’s set a towering echo of the cliff face featured in the film dominating the aunties’ shop where the action takes place. And there Billy dreams his dreams, determined to seek stardom by getting to Inis Mor. But in this cruel world, where his parents have drowned themselves and no one will tell him why, he uses skulduggery to get there, along with the object of his desire — the psychotic Slippy Helen and her sweetie-obsessed daft brother Bartley.
Left on the island when he takes off for Hollywood (he imagines) are the vicious boatman Babbybobby, the aunties, and the local“newsvendor” (gossip) Johnnypateenmike, offering his “news” with malevolent relish. His news usually accompanies a lugubriously profane denigration of his 90-year-old dipsomaniac bedbound “mammy” with whom he lives in harmonious mutual loathing.
Everything is violent in this society: Slippy Helen likes hurting people as much as kissing them, Babbybobby goes armed with an iron bar on all occasions, and Johnnypateenmike fantasises a gruesome death for his foulmouthed mammy. But there’s only one death: cripple Billy returns from New York with his tail between his legs, and his eyes opened to the different viciousness of Hollywood. He takes a beating from Babbybobby followed by kisses from Slippy Helen. The aunties are restored from near madness at missing him, and believing him dead. But nobody knows that life is imitating art, in this case the art of lying, and Billy’s tragic lies are about to come true.
That Flynn’s direction manages all this while turning the parodic language and characters into a tragic love story (albeit a warped one) is almost miraculous.
And while Ruairi Heading makes a touchingly innocent Billy, it’s Phelim Drew as the sly Johnnypateenmike who walks away with the piece, ably assisted by beautifully paced portrayals of the aunties by Catherine Walsh and Norma Sheahan. Jamie Lee O’Donnell produces a terrific combination of violent frustration and dangerous bloodymindedness as Slippy Helen, while Rosaleen Linehan gives a trademark portrayal of a bolshie bedbound mammy.
Sean Fox is the equally psychotic Babbybobby and Ian O’Reilly a bewildered Bartley, everybody’s dopey foil. And there’s a nicely moidered Dr McSharry from John Olohan.
Technical credits are as impressive, with Ciaran Bagnall’s superb lighting highlighting MacCarthaigh’s impressive set and Sinead Cuthbert’s costume designs. Ger Sweeney is responsible for a massively convincing rock sculpture, Jay Cosgrave for the stomach-churning fight sequence, with a wonderful melange of mid-atlantic “oirishhry” and swing from Carl Kennedy.
But it’s Flynn’s direction which transforms it into theatre, rather than silly parody with nothing to recommend it other than its violence.