DazeVlog

Noël Coward theatre, London
The Poldark star gives an excellent performance in a first-rate revival of Martin McDonagh’s brutally funny play

Poldark fans turning up to see Aidan Turner in Martin McDonagh’s bilious, blood-strewn comedy may be in for a surprise. Instead of a liberal Cornish mine-owner, Turner plays – and very well, too – an Irish freedom fighter, Padraic, who is deemed too mad for the IRA. What is fascinating is seeing how a play, written in 1994 but not premiered until 2001, makes a subtly different impact today.

I vividly recall the outrage the play originally caused. I remember an Irish critic fuming at what he saw as a slur on his nation and I had cat-loving friends who were equally incensed. Both parties were offended by a plot in which “mad Padraic”, a violent member of a republican splinter group, returns to his native Inishmore to find that his beloved cat, Wee Thomas, is deader than any doornail. Not fooled by desperate attempts to cover an orange cat with shoe polish to disguise Wee Thomas’s demise, Padraic vows revenge on his dad, Donny, and on the moggie’s assumed killer, Davey. But the plot thickens and the blood flows as Padraic is assailed by murderous gunmen and rescued only by Davey’s wild sister.

This is comedy at its blackest. But a play that was hair-raisingly risky to stage in 2001, when bombing of the UK mainland was still current and the peace process was a pipe dream, now seems strangely prescient. It is obviously about Ireland, but its portrait of the sentimentality and sanctimonious rhetoric that often lies behind terrorist violence has acquired new resonance. McDonagh especially skewers the puritanism that is part of purblind devotion to a cause. When Padraic tortures a drug pusher who corrupts Catholic kids or declares, “I’m interested in no social activities that don’t involve the freeing of Ulster”, we might be listening to any form of religious fanaticism.

McDonagh’s real gift, however, is for pushing a situation to its most brutal extreme, and being funny with it. This is Titus Andronicus played for laughs.

Sometimes, the jokes are barely remarked, as when Davey, speaking of the local cats, says: “They’re all full of themselves.” Other times they are more visible. When Padraic vows not to marry Davey’s sister until Ireland is free, his father concludes: “That’ll be a long fecking engagement!” Far from being frivolous, however, the humour is all part of McDonagh’s ethical assault on the politics of revenge.

This comes across clearly in Michael Grandage’s comically horrific production, set in a stone-walled cottage designed by Christopher Oram, where blood sprays the window panes as in a splatter movie. Turner is excellent as Padraic, and plays him not as some wild-eyed barbarian but as a man endowed with a demented innocence. When he tortures the pusher, he appears solicitous for his welfare. In other moments he seems unable to relate cause and effect. Addressing a colleague, one of whose eyes he shot with a crossbow, he remarks: “You never let bygones be bygones, you.”

My abiding image, however, is of Turner caressing his dead cat with a tendresse he never displays to humans. Charlie Murphy as the girl for whom he finally falls, Chris Walley as her hapless brother and Denis Conway as Padraic’s dad all give good support. Although I could have done without an interval, this strikes me as a first-rate revival of a play that still instructively shocks.

At Noël Coward theatre, London, until 8 September.

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