The Lieutenant of Inishmore - WAAPA

Reviewed by Paul Treasure

---

The 3rd Year acting students from WAAPA have taken on a mighty challenge by presenting us with Martin McDonagh’s incredibly dark comedy, The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Performing at the Subiaco Arts Centre, set designer Ruby Trevor-Mills has made the decision to present us with a single living room set, portraying the various changes in locale through a repositioning of furniture. While this could have become confusing, it was intelligently done, and every change was very clear, while also underlying a sense that there was very fundamentally very little difference between any of the places that we visited, that none of these people were unique and special in any way, and that the horrors we were about to witness had been normalised for the characters. The Stage Management team were incredibly swift and efficient in their changes. Costume Design by Alice Silapaduriyank was accurate and evocative, and gave us a good sense of the time period in which the play was set. The handful of special effects were very well done, especially the visual ricocheting of bullets off a bicycle. Gunshots can be very difficult to achieve believably in a stage production, but the effects were well designed and impeccably timed. A recurrent issue with heavily accented plays like this one is managing to strike the fine balance between being accurate to the accent, while at the same time being understandable to the audience. Luzia Faraday has done a sterling job with her charges. The excellent accent work was, for the most part, understandable, but also came across as deliciously specific.

The actors themselves attacked the play with gusto, and it was a pleasure watching them immerse themselves in the violence and gore of the script. Casey Stevenson, as Padraic, gave a killer performance. In a role that could very easily dissolve into a comic book portrayal, he gave us a nuanced and sensitive characterisation. From the very moment he first appears onstage, he just oozes menace and danger. Larger than life but never anything but real, he manages to portray absolute love and devotion for his cat, with incredibly poignant scenes of grief when he believes it has been killed, to psychopathic disdain for the other humans onstage with him. Cj Ransome, as Davey, starts the play with a convincing sense of panic that he manages to sustain throughout the entire 90 minutes, colouring it masterfully as he tries frantically to extricate himself from his precarious situation. Daniel Hamerick is hampered with playing the role of Donny, a role that he is too young to play convincingly, and it is often muddied that his character is considerably older than the other main characters onstage. Despite these challenges, he does give a very good performance, and his air of resignation counters well to Ransome’s desperation. Katie Cameron is given the opposite challenge with her character, the 16-year-old Mairead. She hits her notes perfectly, with a beautiful sense of timing and a wonderfully rounded interpretation, but we never truly see the boyish 16-year-old she is described as. 

To describe this play as a ‘dark comedy’ underappreciates exactly how dark this comedy actually is. Annie Houston has done a good job directing her cast and crew through this unbelievably bleak yet hilarious play. Yet we come out feeling that we are missing something. The comedy was done very well, but it feels the production has only just scratched the surface of this play and its themes of the futility and endlessness of political violence, and the horrible dehumanising effect it has on not only its combatants, but also those forced to live amongst it. Themes that, while pertinent in the Ireland of the ‘90s, are unfortunately just as timely in today’s world.

With any production by an educational institution such as WAAPA, one must always bear in mind that for the cast and crew, this is an assessment, and this show does feel very much like that. It does have a sense that if you sat down and watched it with a marking key, you could tick off everything on the list as being beyond expectations, and the cast and crew are to be congratulated on their achievement. As a piece of theatre, however, it ultimately felt too studied and was never really given the chance to breathe and come to life as it possibly could have done.

Reviewer Note: Tickets for this review were provided by WAAPA.