The Lieutenant of Inishmore

by Martin McDonagh

Overview

A farcical look at political violence as it's played out during the Troubles in Northern Ireland against the drab backdrop of a bare, rustic Irish cottage and unending boredom in an inhospitable environment in which a mutilated cat sets off a murderous cycle of revenge.

Wee Thomas was a friendly cat. He would always say hello to you were you to see him sitting on a wall. (Pause.) He won't be saying hello no more, God bless him. Not with that lump of a brain gone.

Who knocked Wee Thomas over on the lonely road on the island of Inishmore, and was it an accident? "Mad Padraig" will want to know when he gets back from a stint of torture and chip shop bombing in Northern Ireland: he loves that cat more than life itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780413765000
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/25/2008
Series:	Modern Classics
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.16(d)

About the Author

Martin McDonagh is a London-born Irish playwright whose first play The Beauty Queen of Leenane was the 1996 winner of the George Devine Award. It also won the Writer's Guild Award for Best Fringe Play and the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer. The play was nominated for six Tony awards, of which it won four, and the Laurence Olivier Award. Since then McDonagh has gone on to write multiple smash-hit shows and films and win multiple awards including an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film for Six Shooter (2005), an Oscar nomination, a British Independent Film Award for best screenplay, an Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild Award for Best Film Script and a BAFTA for best original screenplay, all for In Bruges (starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, 2008), and a Laurence Olivier award for Best New Play for The Pillowman (won 2004).

Patrick Lonergan is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at University of Galway, Ireland.

Jenny Stevens was an Associate Lecturer for the Open University and currently combines educational consultancy work with teaching and writing. She is the co-author with Pamela Bickley of Essential Shakespeare: The Arden Guide to Text and Interpretation (2013) and Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama: Text and Performance (2016).

Chris Megson is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has taught and published widely in the field of modern drama, and is editor of The Methuen Drama Book of Naturalist Plays. Other works include: Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present (with Alison Forsyth, 2011), and Modern British Playwriting: The 70s: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations (2012).

Matthew Nichols graduated from the University of Birmingham in 2003 and has been teaching and leading outstanding Drama and Performing Arts departments for over a decade. Matthew also has extensive experience at a senior level with several exam boards, and was responsible for writing one of the reformed GCSE qualifications in Drama. In addition, Matthew works with schools, colleges, universities and theatres across the country. Matthew is a successful and sought after Drama education consultant, and was one of the founders of Drama Defined, which specialises in delivering high quality Drama education courses to staff and students. Matthew is currently Head of Drama at Manchester Grammar School. You can reach him on Twitter @matthew_drama.

Editorial Reviews

In the person of a man who can break off from torturing a chain-suspended victim to have a fretful mobile phone conversation about the health of his cat, McDonagh makes mock of the psychotic sentimentality of Irish nationalist terrorism.

Independent

...cunningly constructed, deeply and intensely felt, bitterly blood curdling and breathtakingly funny.

Sunday Times (London)

McDonagh weaves the strands of his plot together with superb panache and his dialogue is a joy, full of debunking humor that reveals the terrorists in their absurdly dim true colors.

Daily Telegraph (London)

You can't imagine how many dramatic developments, how much horror, how much comedy, McDonagh spins as a consequence of [a] cat's death...his blackest, funniest, most violent, most absurd...play to date.

Financial Times (London)

The plot is so sublime, the script so witty and the twist at the end so clever that I was won over...

Stage (London)

Gleeful, gruesome play about political terrorism in rural Ireland, which won the Olivier Award for best comedy...Appallingly entertaining...Enlightening...Lieutenant is brazenly and unapologetically a farce. But it is also a severely moral play, translating into dizzy absurdism the self-perpetuating spirals of political violence that now occur throughout the world.” —The New York Times

“A cautionary fairy tale for our toxic times. In its horror and hilarity, it works as an act of both revenge and repair, turning the tables on grief and goonery, and forcing the audience to think about the unthinkable.” —The New Yorker

“There's more than one way to skin a theatrical cat; and McDonagh's chosen weapons are laughter and gore Pushing theatre to its limits, McDonagh is making a serious point a work as subversive as those Synge and O'Casey plays that sparked Dublin riots in the last century.” —Guardian

“A brave satire Swiftianly savage and parodic with explicit brutal actino and lines which sing with grace and wit.” —Observer

From the Publisher

A brave satire Swiftianly savage and parodic with explicit brutal actino and lines which sing with grace and wit.

Observer

There's more than one way to skin a theatrical cat; and McDonagh's chosen weapons are laughter and gore Pushing theatre to its limits, McDonagh is making a serious point a work as subversive as those Synge and O'Casey plays that sparked Dublin riots in the last century.

Guardian

A cautionary fairy tale for our toxic times. In its horror and hilarity, it works as an act of both revenge and repair, turning the tables on grief and goonery, and forcing the audience to think about the unthinkable.

The New Yorker

Gleeful, gruesome play about political terrorism in rural Ireland, which won the Olivier Award for best comedy...Appallingly entertaining...Enlightening...Lieutenant is brazenly and unapologetically a farce. But it is also a severely moral play, translating into dizzy absurdism the self-perpetuating spirals of political violence that now occur throughout the world.

The New York Times