If you’re a fan of dark comedies, you most likely think of great films like “Pulp Fiction” or “In Bruges”, where truly unique characters finding themselves in tragi-comedic situations that cause you to laugh and yet be shocked simultaneously by the inappropriateness of the subject matter. They are exceedingly difficult to pull off on screen, rarer still to see it pulled off successfully on the stage.
Luckily, author Martin McDonagh (who actually wrote and directed In Bruges) knows what it takes to make this genre work in live theatre, as demonstrated in the wildly funny and enjoyably outrageous production of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, which opened Sunday evening at the Center Theater Group’s Mark Taper Forum.
The title character of The Lieutenant of Inishmore is Padraic, a man who has become the most fearsome member of a splinter group of the Irish Republican Army, because the IRA “… wouldn’t let him in because he’s too mad.” Despite his day-job trying to bomb pubs and fish-n-chip shops, Padraic is also an avid cat lover, who has left his pet, Wee Thomas (his only friend for the past 15 years), back home in the care of his father, Donny.
As the play opens, however, Donny and a local boy, Davey, stand over the deceased remains of the black cat, knowing that this will no doubt send Padraic into a rage. Sure enough, when Padraic gets the call that Wee Thomas is “not doing well” (Donny and Davey don’t want to worry him too much), he’s so distraught, he can’t bring himself to continue torturing a man who’s been selling drugs to school kids. So he hops on the first boat back to Inishmore to see and hopefully nurse Wee Thomas back to health.
The sequence of events that follows takes the audience on a wicked ride that is all at once shocking, comically absurd, terrorizing, farcical, and laugh out loud funny, told with razor sharp wit and barbed quips that are as potent as Padriac’s highly effective terrorism methods.
While all of McDonagh’s characters are lacking in the moral standards department – even a 16 year old girl who’s a wannabe IRA soldier has taken to practicing her rifle skills shooting out the eyes of cows – you can’t help but love them. As they banter endlessly and mindlessly with one another, you’re never sure if the next moment will have them hugging or pulling a gun on one another. The volatile mixture of personalities in this absurdist situation is like fanning the flames of a fire in a dynamite factory, accelerating the combustion to the inevitably explosive end.
While this play has already been produced around the world (it was first produced in London in 2001 and staged on Broadway in 2006), what makes this production noteworthy is the performance of Chris Pine as the title character, “Lieutenant Padraic”. Best known as “Capt. James Kirk” from the film re-boot of the Star Trek series, Pine is both inhumanely terrorizing and frailly human at the same time. Like a cat toying with a mouse before ultimately devouring it, Pine has the audience in the palm of his hand from the moment he appears on stage, even as he tortures a man by pulling out his toenails and threatening to slice off the man’s nipples.
