The Cripple of Inishmaan

by Martin McDonagh

Overview

In 1934, the people of Inishmaan learn that the Hollywood director Robert Flaherty is coming to the neighboring island to film a documentary. No one is more excited than Cripple Billy, an unloved boy whose chief occupation has been grazing at cows and yearning for a girl who wants no part of him. For Billy is determined to cross the sea and audition for the Yank. And as news of his audacity ripples through his rumor-starved community, The Cripple of Inishmaan becomes a merciless portrayal of a world so comically cramped and mean-spirited that hope is an affront to its order.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472533289
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	12/04/2013
Series:	Modern Plays
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Martin McDonagh's first play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, was nominated for six Tony Awards, of which it won four, and the Laurence Olivier Award. In 2003, his play The Pillowman had its world premiere at the National Theatre, London, and received the 2004 Olivier Award. In 2006, McDonagh won an Oscar for his short film Six Shooter. In 2009, In Bruges won a BAFTA for best original screenplay. His most recent works include In Bruges, A Behanding in Spokane, and Seven Psychopaths.

Table of Contents

Chronology
Plot overview
Commentary: - Context - Structure - Themes - Characters
Play text
Notes
Questions for Further Study
Further reading

Editorial Reviews

McDonagh's...comic talent appears unlimited, and he also has a way...of mixing up his humor with a touch of the poet and a profound sense of tragedy always dangerously lurking on comedy's untidy fringe. In short, young McDonagh is a playwright to reckon with...

NY Post

...McDonagh's storytelling style...has the clarity and power of fable. Each character enters not only with his own idiosyncrasy but with his own distinct idiom. McDonagh skillfully juggles rhythms and repetitions so as to illuminate the sadness, defensiveness and longing for connection underneath the characters' badinage.

New Yorker

McDonagh...is at root an Irish realist in the tradition of Synge, O'Casey, Friel and Billy Roche. He is also a born storyteller with a precocious sense of dramatic structure.

London Times

Mr. McDonagh [is] a realist with rich gifts...[He] is immensely talented and bizarre.

NY Observer

McDonagh's play wittily exposes the multiple layers of myth that surround Ireland.” —Michael Billington, Guardian

“McDonagh is a writer with a gift for scorching entertainment.” —Henry Hitchings, London Evening Standard

“McDonagh is a master technician — he can whip up larger-than-life yet convincing characters and situations faster than any of his peers...he's expert at creating laugh-aloud comedy out of private cruelty. But if, to put it mildly, compassion has never been his strong suit, this is his play which most elicits genuine empathy.” —David Benedict, Variety

“Written with verbal brio and gleefully scant regard for sensitivities” —Sarah Hemming, Financial Times

“McDonagh - with his mastery of caustic dialogue - has drawn such weird, funny characters ... that this black comedy comes across as strangely celebratory of rural misery.” —Time Out

“McDonagh refuses to romanticise ... emotionally cunning plot and themes of romanticism punctured, trapped rurality and the power of stories true or false ... each character has its own rhythm and eloquence, absurdity and dignity ... as ever in McDonagh, a jagged, violent darkness feeds the comedy, and laughter glistens in the deepest despair. In its final moments the see-saw of hope and tragedy moves so fast you gasp.” —Libby Purves, The Times

“A gloriously perverse writing talent ... playing with Irish stereotypes, flaunting the scabrous and outrageous is McDonagh's stock in trade ... his gift for teasing with comic caricature romps away ... language to bite on and speeches that ring with unusual cadences.” —Susannah Clapp, Observer

“Packed with cranky characters, running gags and entertainingly rude slurs, plus psychopathic moments” —Kate Bassett, Independent on Sunday

“As soon as you encounter any literary representations of 'the real Ireland', you enter the world of myth and myth-making, and the play has great ironic fun with all this. It's a mash-up of Irishness and stage Irishness, poverty and groping priests, ignorance supplemented by an utterly untrammelled imagination, a pastiche of Synge and Yeats and all that old Oirishy ... But there's also a genuinely haunting sense here that your impoverished Irish peasant, before cars and TV and radio and the net, really did have a freedom of imagination now lost” —Christopher Hart, The Sunday Times

“Wistful ... McDonagh's greatest skill is investing his characters with authentic voices and distinct personalities ... this is theatre with a living, beating heart” —Tim Walker, Sunday Telegraph

From the Publisher

A darkly savage account of lives stunted in a small 1930s rural community… McDonagh offers a cast of characters whose frail humanity is tested by the fictions that they weave… break-your-heart, cruelly funny.

Guardian