In the opening scene of ‘The Lieutenant of Inishmore,’ two seemingly normal people sit down to have a seemingly normal conversation in a seemingly normal cottage. Outside the window is the rural expanse of the Irish hills on the Aran Island of Inishmore.

It’s a beautiful setup, really, until the audience’s gaze moves stage right to the kitchen table, and suddenly it’s not quite so gorgeous and tranquil after all.

A lovely black cat rests sprawled on top, slumped motionless with its face away from the crowd. The cat is dead, killed brutally, and the evidence gushes from its head, with blood and bodily excrements strewn across the area it lays. This grisly image sets the tone for the rest of the play – one dead feline with no detail left to the imagination – and it’s supposedly a comedy.

‘The Lieutenant of Inishmore,’ which runs through Feb. 3, is a rare disappointment from Syracuse Stage. It’s a production that may appeal to theatergoers with an incredibly strong stomach and a weak sense of political appropriateness.

By the end of this ‘dark comedy,’ about two quarts of fake blood are splattered across the stage, four people and another cat are graphically murdered and we’re left wondering the point of it all – and a little nauseous. ‘Inishmore’s’ themes concerning the futility of violence seem hypocritical with the overabundance of gore on display.

As for the little semblance that is the plot, the play tells the story of Padraic (Christian Conn), a merciless terrorist leading a splinter group of the Irish Republican Army with an obsessive affinity for his pet, Wee Thomas. That’s the poor cat with its brains oozing from its head in the first scene.

Padraic returns home to discover his ‘only friend in the world’ all but decapitated. Also, in his home are a host of other strange guests – including former colleagues of Padraic from a less-splintered splinter group, and the show turns into a bloodthirsty torture session disguised as a farcical black comedy.

The first act remains almost completely devoid of violence, outside of a short scene with Padraic conversing with one of his terror victims, a shirtless drug pusher with only eight toenails and blood dripping down his chest.

But by intermission, the characters have already made demeaning remarks toward Irishmen, Englishmen, blacks and women. The writing contains so much gratuitous cursing that a sentence barely goes by without at least one utterance of a particular four-letter swear word.

In the second act, the bloodshed starts immediately and lasts the rest of the show. Almost every character enters the stage carrying razors and guns, each with a violent agenda. The other three terrorists want Padraic dead. Padraic desperately needs to avenge his murdered cat.

As characters begin to die, the duo of Donny (Don Amendolia) and Davey (Patrick Edgar) have the disgusting job of hacking the corpses into oblivion for eventual disposal. Padraic barks explicit orders, telling Donny, his father, to knock the teeth out of the dead bodies before chopping off the head. Throughout all of this, the blood and human remains continue to spurt.

In one particularly vulgar scene, Padraic and Davey’s sister, Mairead (Molly Camp), are locked in an overtly sexual embrace while Padraic dangles a grotesque dead cat across her back and down to her posterior, no doubt alluding to an obscene fetish supposed to be funny.

Considering the crude source material, it’s unfair to blame the cast, which delivers relatively strong performances, despite the play’s shortcomings. Camp deserves special recognition for her portrayal of a 16-year-old wannabe terrorist with a crush on Padraic and a deadly shot with a popgun.

The play is supposed to be a social commentary on the hypocrisy of terrorism, using gore to poke holes at the violent atrocities in today’s world. Perhaps it is, and playwright Martin McDonagh clearly has an ear for good dialogue. The conversations are fresh, and some of the one-liners are, admittedly, funny enough to illicit laugher in a weak moment.

But do we really need a sordid bloodbath to make a point we all already know?

Published on January 22, 2008 at 12:00 pm