Dumb and dumber | 12 July 2018

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a knockabout farce set during the Troubles. Like Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch it uses the expiry of a pet to examine human obsessiveness and self-delusion. But it takes two hours rather than three minutes to make its point. We meet a handsome terrorist, Padraic (Aidan Turner), whose adoration of his black cat symbolises his crazed devotion to republicanism. The cat is accidentally run over by Davey, an amiable twerp on a bike, who must find a new cat or face reprisals from the insanely brutal Padraic. Donny, Padraic’s dad, offers to help Davey and they borrow a ginger cat, which they blacken with boot polish.

That’s the level of narrative ingenuity here: children’s television. The writer, Martin McDonagh, works from a very limited psychological palette. He can barely write a female character and his males have only two discernible traits, stupidity and malice. Donny and Davey are merely stupid. Padraic is stupid and malicious. The rest of the characters — a group of thugs chasing Padraic over some dispute — are so stupidthat their malice endangers no one but themselves.

The play unfolds as a series of joke torture sessions and comedy executions performed by blithering dimwits. ‘’Tis incidents loik dis does put tourists off Oirland,’ says a bumpkin with the IQ of a starfish. The Irish accents seemed to me to lack precision. I’m no expert but I could tell that Davey (Chris Walley) sounded like a Kerryman while Donny, his neighbour, had a Cork or a Limerick accent. And the thugs pursuing Padraic talked like Ulstermen some of the time, and like southern Irishmen the rest of the time.

It would be easy to dismiss this piffle as a failed experiment but the play includes details of recent history.