The Lieutenant of Inishmore

The gruesome image of a murdered cat opens the play, setting the tone for a farcical black comedy. A farce uses over-the-top, absurd situations that are often highlighted with physical comedy, such as slapstick violence. The characters lack complexity, and humor arises from their absence of self-awareness. Black comedy is a genre that relies on dark jokes and gallows humor to elicit laughter about subjects that typically call for outrage or tears in real life. McDonagh highlights the absurdity of paramilitary violence by lifting the homicidal Padraic and his three ruthless INLA frenemies out of the context of the violent conflict in Northern Ireland and placing them in Padraic’s rural hometown, where he has a father and a cat. Comedy requires a level of distancing between the audience and the action onstage, because too much empathy tends to get in the way of laughing at someone’s blunders and misfortunes. This typically means utilizing identifiable stereotypes and tropes, or dehumanizing characters through generalization and exaggeration. In Lieutenant of Inishmore in particular, McDonagh has received criticism for using stereotypes of Irishness that some scholars consider reductive, reinforcing colonialist views of the Irish and undermining the republican cause. Other scholars contend that his depictions aren’t satirizing Irishness or republican objectives, but rather satirizing the absurd violence of their tactics. The four INLA interlopers, and Padraic in particular, are four men who have modeled their personas after cinematic stereotypes of violent goons. They don’t just kill for the cause—they also hatch convoluted plots about killing cats and affect action-star flair (such as killing with two guns at once), performing the roles of stereotypically-terrifying, cold-blooded mobsters.

Comic distance allows audiences to laugh at horrible things, but McDonagh challenges the convention of comic distance in a way that refuses to allow audiences to fully separate. The Lieutenant of Inishmore is certainly his bloodiest play, but comic violence is a common element in his work. Comic violence, particularly in farce, is usually exaggerated in its spectacle but minimized or abstracted in its effects. A person can receive a hard hit from a frying pan squarely in the face and stand back up. In McDonagh’s plays, he creates humorous situations with absurd juxtapositions, such as a murderer who waxes poetic about his beloved cat, but the resulting comic humor has viscerally-realistic materiality. Donny holds up the dead cat, and its brains fall out, a gory and lifelike image of death made comic by Davey’s insistence that the cat might just need to go to a vet. When Padraic tortures James, the actor is hung upside down for the duration of the scene. Although the audience knows he’s an actor and presumably hung safely, he is still enduring the very real and visible discomfort of performing the scene while the blood rushes to his head. In the final bloody showdown, the three INLA goons wander blindly with their eyes graphically shot out before Padraic shoots Brendan and Joey in the head with two guns at close range. The gory damage to their skulls is implied by Christy begging Padraic not to shoot him in the face. Padraic complies, but upon learning that Christy killed his cat, he decides to torture him to death. Although the torture happens between scenes, the result—a homemade cross shoved through his head—effectively evokes that violence. Then, the onstage dismemberment of realistic replicas of the actors’ bodies, punctuated by casual comments about the difficulty of severing spines by hand (or dismembering one’s son), emphasizes that these are, beneath the stereotypes and performance, real humans whose blood and guts are now splattered all over the set.

McDonagh also violates the rules of distance by interjecting mentions of real events. For a non-Irish audience member, most of the references to violent events during the Troubles sound like stereotypes of Irish terrorists used for comic effect. In Scene 2, for instance, Padraic pauses in his violent torture to speak casually on the phone with his father. He creates an absurd juxtaposition by mentioning attempts to bomb chip shops as if he’s chattering about a normal day at the office. But the reference alludes to a real attack in 1993, in which the IRA bombed a chip shop and killed nine civilians. Later, Padraic laments how life will never be the same with his cat dead, as Wee Thomas was always encouraging him in his mind as he’d “lob a bomb at a pub, or be shooting a builder” (44), which references a 1992 murder of eight Protestant civilian builders who were hired to work on a military base. When musing about the merits of the IRA as opposed to the INLA, Davey comments, “You never see the INLA shooting Australians” (55), referring to Stephen Melrose and Nicholas Spanos, two Australian tourists whom the IRA murdered in the Netherlands in 1990. Likewise, Joey references the murder of Airey Neave by the INLA in 1979, complaining, “You can’t blow up a fella just because he has a funny name” (29). Some critics have expressed distaste at McDonagh’s use of these incidents as punchlines, but he repeatedly and purposefully makes these allusions throughout the play to call attention to this extreme violence. Overall, the play refers to 23 innocent victims of Irish terrorist violence. As Patrick Lonergan says in his monograph The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh, “No member of McDonagh’s audience should go away feeling comfortable with his or her responses” (Lonergan, 84); audiences are meant to laugh and then think about what they’re laughing at.