The Cripple of Inishmaan

DATING LAME Monaghan tries to get some sugar from Condon

Photograph: Keith Pattison

Audience members rioted during the 1907 premiere of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, irked by the playwright’s broad depiction of loutish, violent Irish peasants. Imagine if those same folk had viewed Martin McDonagh’s vicious black comedy The Cripple of Inishmaan: A Bible is tossed into the sea, a mother is forced into drunkenness and a disabled youth is beaten bloody—all amid copious swearing. Ticket holders would have burned the fecking building to the ground and pissed on its ashes.

Strangely enough, Cripple (which played at the Public Theater in 1998) is gentler than McDonagh’s two most recent productions here, The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Pillowman. In this cheeky gloss on Synge and O’Casey, McDonagh spins hectic blarney from a historical footnote: In 1934, Hollywood director Robert Flaherty comes to the remote Aran Islands to film a documentary. Inishmaan’s local freak, the physically twisted but mentally agile orphan Billy (Aaron Monaghan) sees an escape from his dull parochial existence. Plus, he’s not getting anywhere with sadistic flirt Helen (Kerry Condon), while his fretful foster mothers Kate and Eileen (Marie Mullen and Dearbhla Molloy) merely patronize him.

McDonagh’s control of grotesquerie never tips too far into cartoon, while director Garry Hynes and members of Ireland’s Druid Theatre Company nail the deadpan lyricism; their visiting production deftly shifts from bitter satire to flashes of compassion. The result is deliciously outrageous—but thanks to the leavening laughs, never an outrage.