Characteristics

The play

• can be viewed as politically incorrect or correct depending on your point of view. In other words it has polarized the views of audiences and critics
• continually and consistently challenges the moral, social, political and cultural norms of the audience
• explores cruelty and comedy; these go hand in hand as it is undeniably a violent and horrific play. For example, what makes the violence hard to stomach is the comedy which accompanies it, and it is this irreverence to the violence of the Northern Irish political situation which so unnerves some critic and audience members. Furthermore, the ongoing joke in the play is established in the second scene as it emerges that Padraic cares more for his sick cat than for the human victims of his crimes (Rees, 2006).
• delves into the violent and dark side of life
• gives voice to unthinkable acts of terrorism and the barbaric
• focuses on all characters lack of intelligence and empathy, which results in carnage and sets up the comedy
• re-creates seemingly authentic bloody corpses of cats and humans on the stage floor. Blood winds up on pretty much every surface of the stage and actors. It is splashed, splattered and smeared over walls, floor, furniture, the actor's skin, clothes, and the cat's fur (Brantley, 2006)
• uses humour to confront an audience with human experiences of pain, loss, the controversial and the taboo. Lizzie Loveridge says that when Martin McDonagh' s new play, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company's theatre in Stratford, it caused a sensation. People walked out because of the violence depicted on stage, but what she found was a black comedy play that was blisteringly funny. The critics were divided.:· between those whose sensibilities were offended by the torture and carnage and literal butchery on the stage, and those who were able to laugh at the hapless bunch of would-be terrorists and residents of inishmore (Loveridge, 2001, p.l).

Dramatic forms and performance styles

This play could be described as genre-busting as it seeks to test the limits of theatricality, and to push the boundaries of what can be shown on stage. These include:

• a caricature performance style which focuses on the childlike innocence and stupidity of the· individuals. They are distorted characters.
• comedy and cruelty; McDonagh says he walks the line between comedy and cruelty because he thinks one illuminates the other.
• elements of Absurdist Theatre
• farce; the brutality of play resembles farce, for example, the bodies pile up in carnage
• In-yer-face Theatre which is a dramatic form created in the I 990's by Aleks Sierz in response to the global events of that decade. In-yer face Theatre is characterised by abuse and violence as well as by un-ideological characters. This type of form examines issues that are not only politically incorrect but often have highly explicit scenes of violence and the effect can be deeply disturbing (ln-Yer­Face Theatre, 2009). Its power lies in the directness of its shock tactics, the immediacy of the language, the relevance of the themes and the stark aptness of its stage pictures (Rees, 2006, p.138)
• Jacobean revenge tragedies where the dominant motive was for revenge for a real or imagined injury and ends with a scene of carnage and accepted Joss of human life as part of the theatrical occasion
• Jacobean tragic comedies which explored morality in a world in which the traditional bases no longer seemed to have any validity
• Non-motive theatre. It is has been described as a nightmare for actors who work with motive as the characters objectives are almost unchanging. The idea of realism hardly exists and there is no true character cause and effect in the play
• Structural classicism which is a style where the unities of time, place and action are adhered to. For example, within the first scene the audience have acquired the necessary knowledge about the play's hero, the world that shaped him, and the specific cause of the action to follow (Brantley, 2006).