Review: The Lieutenant of Inishmore at Liverpool Everyman ****1/2

There’s a lengthy advisory for The Lieutenant of Inishmore – Liverpool Everyman’s brutally funny new production marking the theatre’s 60th anniversary.

Martin McDonagh’s award-winning black comedy includes, we’re counselled, loud gunshots, large amounts of blood and gore, torture, gun and knife violence and some strong language.

And this new outing for the play, under Chris Sonnex’s deft direction, certainly delivers all that in spades. Plus pliers, knives, hammers, and any other weapon that comes to hand.

Sonnex cranks up the sheer savage ridiculousness of the action to generate maximum laughs from a comedy that’s as bleak as a windswept island off Ireland’s Atlantic coast and as black as ‘Wee Thomas’ the cat around whom McDonagh’s madcap plot swirls.

Imagine, if you will, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus meets the innocent whimsy of Father Ted.

Set in 1993 Ireland teetering on the brink of the Northern Ireland peace process, the titular Lieutenant of the title is Padraic (Julian Moore-Cook, hints of The Commitments’ drummer Mickah Wallace), a loose cannon with a short fuse who was deemed too ‘mad’ to be allowed into the IRA and so joined the INLA instead.

Psychopathic, puritanical paramilitary he may be - when we meet Moore-Cook’s Padraic he’s engaging in a little light torture of a school gate drug dealer (Michael Tient) dangling precariously from the Everyman’s ceiling, but it turns out that alongside the sadism this hardman also has a strangely innocent and sentimental side, centred around his cat Thomas to whom he’s obsessively devoted.

Above: Davey (Taylor McClaine), Donny (Alan Turkington) and 'wee Thomas'. Top: Padraic (Julian Moore-Cook) at the centre of a stand-off on Inishmore. Photos by Gary Carlton.

In fact, sadism and sentimentality run together through McDonagh’s gleefully dark and gory story – with sentimentality for a pet cat, but also in the reasoning voiced as justification for violence meted out for the ‘cause’.

When Padraic gets word from dad Donny (Alan Turkington) that his pet is poorly, he returns home to the Aran islands where the ‘welcoming’ reception includes teenage paramilitary ingenue dead-shot Mairead who pictures herself as a Bonnie to his Clyde, her hapless brother Davey, and a trio of balaclava-clad INLA comrades who, it turns out, aren’t too happy he’s considering splintering from their splinter organisation. Splitter!

Boot polish and blood – so much blood – smear the surfaces of Ellie Light’s dingy island home set as the noirish action reaches a calamitous but comic crescendo, although there’s also a final delicious twist to the tale.

The all-Irish/Northern Irish cast (several of them graduates of the Lir Academy whose current head is, in a six degrees of separation way, former Everyman and Playhouse artistic director Gemma Bodinetz) plunge into McDonagh’s wild and singular world with enjoyable relish.

However, sometimes the lines are delivered so snappily in brogue so broad that even if you have a keen ear for accents, they’re rendered close to incomprehensible – and while there is a handy surtitle screen, it’s positioned so only those sitting in the main sweep of seats have a clear view of it.