The imagery of cats and animals

An analogy between human life and animal life is pushed to its logical limits in this play (Taggart, 2006, p.170). Find quotes about the animals and consider why McDonagh has used them, and especially cats, as a symbol of obsessive love and torture. Does this dramatic device create an inverted system of values? For example, Padraic discloses that his own seemingly imminent death will matter less to him that that of Wee Thomas and he has not the slightest misgiving about shooting his own father when he suspects him of complicity in killing his cat. Conversely he leaves off the torturing of a drug dealer, James, when the latter only claims that he possesses a cat but comes up with a cure for the ringworm Wee Thomas might be experiencing. Sir Roger means more to Mairead than Padriac and there are also the visual images of Mairead blinding the cows and Padriac feeding an owners' nose to a dog. It is also worth mentioning that at the end of the play Donny and Davey agree to spare a cat's Jife even though they half believe he might deserve shooting.

Audience and Critics

This play has generated a diverse response. Some regard Martin McDonagh's work as fusion of old and new and that he combines recognizable forms with something atypical superimposed. Others find nothing novel or exciting with this play and firmly believe it verges on punk sensibilities. The violence and brutality in this play has proved to be most controversial and divisive and has often offended middle class theater going taste.

McDonagh sees the violence of the nineties needing plays with shocking images combined with comedy to tap into the audience's psyche; he believes that a common reaction to terror is to laugh or ignore it. In The Lieutenant of lnishmore the audience eventually cannot ignore the terror so they laugh, and because of that laughter they are implicated in the violence because they are vicariously enjoying it. This is exactly the uncomfortable position McDonagh wishes to put the audience in (Rees, 2006, p.134).

Critic responses

• Rob Kendt in his Broadway.com Review: "The Lieutenant of lnishmore ... is a series of cheap shots, literally, at the loony fringes of the Irish Republican cause, the play paints true believers, opportunists, and passive bystanders in such cartoonish terms that the angry sneer of its satire -what McDonagh has called his 'pacific rage' as the absurdly ceaseless cycle of bloodshed over
• Ulster -can't be taken seriously" (Broadway.com Staff, 2009, p. l ).
• Frank Scheck of The New York Post: "This latest work ... again demonstrates its creator's affinity for dark and disturbing material that somehow manages to be ruthless funny ... A bloodily slapstick tale of violent revenge that turns out to be the theatrical equivalent of a slasher movie, it is best appreciated for its sheer bravura audacity" (Broadway.com Staff, 2009, p.l).
• Howard Kissel of The New York Daily News: "If Monty Python had ever tackled the issue ofirish terrorism, they might have created something as wild, as brilliant and as weirdly exhilarating as The Lieutenant of Jnishmore ... What is remarkable about the writing is it rigorous logic" (Broadway.com Staff, 2009, p. l ).
• David Rooney of Variety: "With its canny craftsmanship ... savage black humour and vividly musical language; the play certainly commands attention - perhaps inevitable these days for a comedy about fanatical terrorism" (Broadway.com Staff, 2009, p.l).

How the audience are affected by the play

Ashley Taggart said:

" ... my impression of the audience reaction was almost as enduring as that of the performance itself. For the first hour, they gazed on in discomforted silence, assailed as they were with images of feline slaughter, causal torture, cow blinding, all underpinned with escalating threats of ever more explicit and inventive brutality ... Yet, as the absurdities and the corpses continued to pile up in front us, this act of collective repression in the audience began to feel increasingly strained, until finally, at the opening of scene nine ... the dam, belatedly, burst and the auditorium exploded with laughter .... The last 15 minutes of the play rode a massively cathartic surge of (slightly hysterical) energy, powered by the very constraints which had once held it in check" (Taggart, 2006, pp.163-164).