Seventeen years after its first staging, The Lieutenant of Inishmore looks as grisly and giddy as ever. This is the play that seems to jeer at terrorists, having as its antihero an ex-IRA man who is besotted with his cat. Its comic daring forces an audience to look at its own sentimentalities and callousness – indeed, to consider how often these qualities are bound together. A moggy with a gun at its head gets people groaning more loudly than does a man hung upside-down, threatened with having one of his nipples cut off: “Which is your favourite?” asks his torturer.
Martin McDonagh’s play has a considerable past. Written in 1994 – when the peace process was beginning to bubble – it was turned down by the National and the Royal Court before being put on by the RSC in 2001. In 2003, Mehmet Ergen, founder of the Arcola, took the play to Istanbul and put it on shortly after a terrorist atrocity.
McDonagh has since branched out into movies. The landscape of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri may be wider than Inishmore, but the free-floating morality is the same, as is the mordant snap of the lines, and the bloodshed. The damage at the end of this island drama is itemised as two dead cats, four human corpses, one ruined hairstyle, and one empty tin of shoe polish. That misses out several blindings, and menace by cheese grater.
Michael Grandage’s cracking production gains from Christopher Oram’s damp, cramped cottage design – and from particular star casting. Aidan (Poldark) Turner is a robust stage presence: his swagger and terrifying beam seeming to wink at his cliff-top glamour. He has strong support, particularly from Charlie Murphy as a blank-faced young woman (perhaps the true lieutenant of the title) and Chris Walley, who, graduating this month from Rada, has created a sort of modern Andrew Aguecheek – vain, simple, doleful, with much-loved straggling locks and a pink bicycle.
Still, the real stars are the script’s bravado and the spirit of Wee Thomas, the puss who has a terrorist outfit named after him. Mewing patriotic encouragement to his owner on the brink of a particularly ingenious torture, he is deemed a friendly presence. Not like the other cats on the island: they are so “full of themselves”.
McDonagh was part of a revolutionary remaking of Irish drama. The RSC looks at another revolutionary in Miss Littlewood. Here is the tale of two Stratfords: which is the best and which the worst of times? Sam Kenyon’s musical play (he wrote book, lyrics and music) tells the story of Joan Littlewood, founder of Theatre Workshop, boss of Theatre Royal, Stratford East, advocate of devised shows and the non-Rada voice. It is staged in Stratford-upon-Avon, home of the text, and one-time home of a mellifluous RP, which Littlewood deplored.
Miss Littlewood tips a jaunty cap to its surroundings: in a remake of Shakespeare’s seven ages of man, seven women take turns at playing the heroine, who is too varied, it seems, to be captured by one. As an older Joan, Clare Burt lopes compellingly around the action, bringing solitariness and melancholy to a figure sometimes represented as merely pugnaciously perky, often interrupting to replace one actor with another (older, younger, black, white, blonde, brunette). This roughing up of the narrative is from Littlewood’s stylistic toolbox, as is the direct address to the audience (a couple of plants are hauled up from their seats).
The musical numbers run throughout: rumpty-tumpty brass, music hall echoes, sauntering melodies, some big ballads, and one terrific number led by Sophia Nomvete. She is one of the highlights of the evening, playing Avis Bunnage, who often appeared in films as a tight-fisted sourpuss but here is luscious as “a posh northerner”, abundant in jokes and in her all-over dancing – half-assault, half-glide.
I wish that some of Littlewood’s projects were flourishing more – actors without private incomes on stage?! Yet the reach of what she did was tremendous – which is apparent at this other Stratford. No one now thinks it OK for actors to flute beautifully and move awkwardly. Most theatres want to knock stagey on the head with some impro, to segue from speech to song, and to put “ordinary” lives on stage – even if they aren’t prepared to train and employ “ordinary” people. The ribald satire of Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War helped to change the vocabulary of the stage.
Littlewood’s success is a difficulty for Kenyon’s drama. Iconoclasm now looks like orthodoxy, and there isn’t enough implacable opposition here to trigger a sense of danger: a snooty Arts Council bod and on-stage strangled vowels are easy targets. The show often glows but seldom cuts. Action sometimes peters out into declamation: “I want art for everyone.” Yet Erica Whyman’s staging – particularly of Littlewood’s Stratford East productions – frequently fizzes. And it is significant that the story is staged at all. “Why do we know about so many unremarkable men and so few remarkable women?” Joan asks. I don’t think this line would have got such a roar of approval even three years ago. Now, it is almost too easy.
Blanche McIntyre has worked one quiet revolution at the Globe. Hermione is usually taken to be the heroine of The Winter’s Tale. Goddammit: she is a queen. She is also ultra-pure and precipitates the play’s action and big theme – the jealousy of her husband, who wrongly accuses her of adultery with his regal BF, which leads to death, loss and rebirth.
Yet you can’t call her much of a role model. Half the time she is offstage, and when she reappears it’s as a statue. McIntyre’s production proves that Paulina – the independent, verbally forceful woman who guards her queen – is a far more interesting character. Brushing off some sniggers about sharp-tongued women, she is not simply an advocate of the woman who rules her, but the person who brings her to life: a female Pygamalion. At the end, instead of being shunted off to a hastily arranged marriage, she takes to the stage alone, as if about to direct.
McIntyre’s production begins mutedly, with the action languid on the Globe’s wide stage. Will Keen is an unusual Leontes: intense, inward, not so much seized by sudden jealous passion as from the beginning disjointed and dismayed. Nothing in the production quite lives up to the juicy desperation of the play’s language, with its sexy sluicings and slipperiness. But Norah Lopez-Holden is a vigorous (that’s rare) Perdita; Annette Badland brings her beautifully creamy voice to the old shepherd; and, oh Paulina: Sirine Saba acts like a scythe.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Lieutenant of Inishmore ★★★★
Miss Littlewood ★★★
The Winter’s Tale ★★★
• The Lieutenant of Inishmore is at the Noël Coward theatre, London, until 8 September
• Miss Littlewood is at the Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon until 4 August
• The Winter’s Tale is at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 14 October
