[reviewed at Barbican's The Pit] What a bloody good play! If Titus Andronicus had lived in a bleak Irish cottage, then pursued his enemies and left Wee Thomas, his cat, for caring by his bummy Da, the upshot of the cat's death could not have been more gory.
Son Padraic can detonate bombs but likes to torture slowly, as he illustrates on strung-up James, whose toenails he's removed for dealing drugs by schools (and not Protestant ones, either). Naturally far beyond nasty-tempered, Padraic's a free-agent rebel who dislikes the IRA's politics but admires its bomb-making (and, presumably, the "cause"). In due course, his violence takes many forms, from historic to hysterical; "The Patriot Game" dominates as theme song. Back in Galway, learning that Padraic's coming for the cat he thinks is only sick, his father Donny and young Davey, who found the cat and has been accused of running it down, try to disguise a stray. Huge, cabbage-headed Christy, whose eye Padraic put out in a school-days dispute, implicates Davey in the cat's demise. It's really part of a plan to get Padraic back and ambush him.
Also awaiting Padraic is Davy's boyish-looking sister Mairead, just 16, who uses her pop gun to shoot eyes out of cows to make marketing of them to the English unprofitable. She's had eyes for Padraic since age 12 and wants to join him, romantically and politically. The homecoming puts Padraic at the top of his grief, ready to kill the substitute cat, his father and Davey until Christy and fellow IRA gunmen reverse the situation. Then the tables turn again. Yet again there's violence and sentimentality and romance. After talk of forming a new splinter group, since all Padraic "ever wanted was a free Ireland," there's still more violence. "Will it never end?" asks a survivor. The answer is a surprise.
Without a Padraic who can summon up just the right combination of psychotic violence, sentimentality, and wrong-headed righteousness, the Lieutenant could seem too outlandish. David Wilmot concocts the perfect mix. Beyond his blonde good looks can be sensed an inherited coarseness, as it is on the surface of Trevor Cooper's gruff Donny. Owen Sharpe as scared Davy gets many a laugh and sympathy as well. The opposite is true of Colin Mace's Christy, ably flanked by two colleagues in terror. Of optimum value is slim, agile Kerry Condon as the young Mairead, full of raging hormones and resentment.
With scenes bridged by drums and martial music, the staging is as extraordinary as the goings-on are unforgettable. Of course, the current climate brings out the nuances in the talk of terrorism. McDonagh seems here a close successor to Sean O'Casey. The play, though far blacker, is reminiscent thematically and linguistically of The Plough and the Stars, whose Mrs. Clitheroe, in the heat of "the troubles," was asked so importantly: "Is anyone going...with a tither of sense?"
