46 pages • 1 hour read
Martin McDonaghThe Lieutenant of Inishmore
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Absurdity of Terrorist Violence
The Lieutenant of Inishmore is one of McDonagh’s most violent political plays and paradoxically takes an antiviolence stance. McDonagh wrote the play from a place of “pacifist rage,” responding to paramilitary acts of terrorism that were continuing to take innocent lives in Northern Ireland. The word “terrorism” refers to acts of violence or intimidation, often carried out against civilians, that are not sanctioned by the laws or the state with the goal of inspiring fear. During the 1990s, when McDonagh wrote the play and attempted to have it produced, formal peace negotiations had just begun after decades of violence. But terrorist attacks continued throughout the 1990s, and the play takes the stance that this seemingly endless production of terror through the violent murder of civilians is absurd. The philosophy of absurdism, based on the ideas of Albert Camus, is founded on the notion that the universe is irrational, and existence is meaningless. Absurdity arises from the conflict between a meaningless universe and the human desire to impose order on irrationality. McDonagh satirizes the terrorist violence of Northern Irish paramilitaries as chaotic and irrational, and absurdity results from the imposition of a unified political goal—a free and united Ireland—on the actions of multiple paramilitary groups with varying objectives and violent disagreements between (and even within) them. Mairead, the play’s self-designated terrorist-in-training, provides an apt metaphor for the absurdity of terrorist violence. While practicing her sharpshooting, she once used cows as target practice, becoming extremely accurate at shooting out their eyes. When mocked for this, she claims that she was staging a protest against the meat market. In reality, it was a chaotic act of cruelty against innocent animals that can’t be explained with reason, since an eyeless cow can still be butchered for meat. Not to mention, the cows have no more control over the meat market than citizens have over discriminatory policies. Imposing purpose on something that obviously has none is absurd.
For the terrorists in the play, McDonagh highlights the absurdity of their actions by relocating them from the context of Northern Ireland and placing them on a small, quiet island off the western Irish coast. By recontextualizing the characters, the play avoids criticism of the larger goals of republican nationalism because the play isn’t about freeing Northern Ireland. It’s about egregious violence in the name of nationalism and the sadists who join the cause because they enjoy torture and murder. The four INLA goons in the play serve as examples of those who have no qualms about not killing innocent bystanders and using innocent people as disposable pawns. The INLA has handed Christy the task of killing Padraic, who tortured the wrong drug dealer and has been talking about forming a splinter group. Rather than simply assassinating him, Christy creates a complicated scheme that centers on brutally beating an innocent cat to death and using the dead cat and Padraic’s innocent father (and any other bystanders) as pawns to lure Padraic home and execute him. The plot is unnecessarily convoluted, which means a lot can (and does) go wrong, but it allows Christy to maximize Padraic’s suffering by making him endure the death of his beloved cat. Christy even places Davey in the crossfire by telling Mairead that he saw Davey kill the cat. The killing of the cat is an act of terrorism that inspires immediate terror in Donny and Davey because they know that Padraic won’t care whether they’re really at fault. Often, acts of supposed justice and retaliation by paramilitaries used citizens as scapegoats. As predicted, Padraic is indiscriminate in deciding to kill his father and the neighbor boy as retaliation, only shifting his focus when Christy makes a last-minute confession.
Of Christy’s two henchmen—junior INLA members Joey and Brendan—only Joey has a conscience about killing innocents. Joey, disturbed by the vicious killing of the cat and the idea of killing people for no reason, is mocked and nearly killed for his empathy by Christy and Joey. Absurdly, Christy justifies killing the cat by calling the British cat-killers, claiming that Oliver Cromwell murdered “lots of cats” (30) and comparing Bloody Sunday to herding Irish cats together to execute them. That so much is made of the cat’s death by two out of four terrorists also shows the absurdity of terrorist violence. As a contrast, McDonagh inserts casual mentions of real victims of paramilitary violence, often as punchlines. These moments fit into the comic rhythm of the play and elicit laughter from the audience while urging them to rethink what they are laughing at. McDonagh challenges the romanticized trope of the militant Irish nationalist, a stereotype of freedom fighters who may differ but are ultimately working toward the same purpose: freeing Ireland from the colonizers. Under this purpose, violence is justifiable, even necessary, and collateral damage in the form of innocents can’t always be avoided. The play dismantles the cohesiveness of this purpose, depicting the chaotic violence of INLA members who freely invoke the cause of a free Ireland to justify their disorganized sadism. If audiences question the sacrosanct idea of nationalist purpose and see the absurdity of terrorist violence, they must reframe terrorist acts as potentially purposeless, considering each of the thousands of lives destroyed or lost as individual human beings rather than accidental martyrs. It pushes audiences to reconsider the ways they have become complacent under the assumption that terrorist violence is a necessary means to a noble and righteous end.
Irish Nationalism and Compulsory Masculinity
At 16, Mairead is the same age at which Padraic left to join the INLA. She has trained herself to be an excellent shooter. She knows and sings Northern Irish patriotic folk songs. She is familiar with the history, even naming her cat Sir Roger after Sir Roger Casement, an Irish nationalist leader who was executed by the British in 1916. But Padraic is adamant that girls aren’t allowed in the INLA (unless they’re pretty girls, which implies that they are only welcome for sexual purposes). Mairead attempts to supersede the gender norms that keep her out of the INLA by putting on masculinity. She cuts her hair short and dresses in traditionally masculine clothing, but Padraic only sees her as a boy wearing lipstick from a distance and then a girl “with shocking hair” (33). In his plays, McDonagh satirizes the construction of Irishness and national identity, including the notion of the nuclear family, which is founded on strict gender roles and obligatory heteronormativity. Thus, Padraic’s initial recommendation to Mairead is to grow her hair and find a nice boy to marry, attempting to regulate her as a girl who has strayed outside of the gender norm. Similarly, Padraic imposes masculinity on Davey by forcefully cutting his long hair. Davey, who has no interest in joining a paramilitary group, rides around on his mother’s pink bicycle and endures mocking by those who feminize him for his long hair. But unlike Padraic, Davey only has to assert his masculinity enough to appease local bullies.
The play demonstrates that the fluidity of physical expression and sexuality undermines the performances of heteronormativity that are tied to the image of idealized Catholic Irishness. Padraic, who at 12 put his cousin in a wheelchair for laughing at his “girly scarf” (7), betrays his anxieties about gender identity when Mairead questions whether Padraic prefers boys, since girls are excluded from the INLA. Padraic insists, “There’s no boy-preferers involved in Irish terrorism” (33) as a condition of enlistment. But imposing preferences on men committing violence together (and sometimes against each other) destabilizes the presumption of heteromasculinity in the INLA as a male-exclusive space. This confusion of male violence and sexual attraction is certainly present in Padraic’s practice of slicing off men’s nipples. In practice, gay Irish nationalists were covert, and when it became known, it was unacknowledged. For instance, Sir Roger Casement, the namesake for Mairead’s cat, was outed as gay shortly before his execution, based on diaries that may or may not be authentic. Therefore Casement, who Padraic calls “that oul poof” (65), is both gay and not gay, his sexuality hinging on contested documents and recognition. Executed alongside Casement was another rebel named Padraig Pearse—a name that is notably close to Padraic—whose poems and writings suggest that he may have also been attracted to men. In the play, sexuality is similarly unstable, not because there is any concrete reason to question the sexual orientation of the characters, but because anything outside of heteronormativity is taboo. Masculinity and heterosexuality are compulsory for Irish terrorists.
In Postmodern fashion, signs and signifiers of gender and sexuality are ambiguous and arbitrary in the play, demonstrating the absurdism of anti-gay violence and harassment. Padraic, who is targeted for assassination, is guilty of flouting masculine stereotypes as a man who loves his cat. As Davey articulates, liking cats as a man can trigger accusations of being a “gayboy” (18). This is reinforced when Joey’s affection for cats and distaste for killing them nearly provokes Christy and Joey to shoot him. Padraic’s love for Wee Thomas (a male cat), while never hinting at anything perverse or sexual, is almost spousal. Wee Thomas was his only companion in the world, the face in his mind that provided dubious inspiration for Padraic’s acts of terrorism, and whose life he must avenge, even if the cat’s death was an accident and he must kill his father to do it. When Padraic first kisses Mairead, he does so out of joy for the positive (if fake) news she gives about Wee Thomas’s health, making Mairead a surrogate for the cat. But the kiss is awkward and surprising, especially after Mairead just lied about his cat to send him unwittingly to his death in retaliation for his aggression toward her. He sees Mairead’s downplayed femininity as too masculine for sexual attraction and not masculine enough for terrorism, but she disproves both when she saves his life. Padraic tries to coax her into growing her hair longer, attempting to root out any gay undertones of their pairing, but Mairead refuses. He learns, however, that Mairead has the same pseudo-spousal love for her own cat, and they briefly plan to break away from the INLA to form a splinter group where they can be their proud cat-loving selves. They make the seemingly-romantic declaration that they won’t marry until Ireland is free, which, of course, may never happen, making their relationship more symbolic than real. Instead, Padraic becomes Mairead’s first kill, an act of intimacy that begins with a kiss.
Constructions of Irishness and Illogical Morality
McDonagh aroused the ire of some Irish critics with his exaggerated and absurd portrayals of militant Irish nationalists as dim-witted, cold-blooded gangsters. One scholar accused McDonagh of selling out to the English and feeding anti-Irish sentiment by removing the political context and history of paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland. McDonagh’s Irishness has even been called into question as an Irish-English dual citizen who grew up in London, largely because his plays don’t fit into the traditions of Irish drama. But The Lieutenant of Inishmore subtly demonstrates knowledge of history, cultural values, and literature by subverting the commonly romanticized narratives and idealized tropes of militant Irish nationalism. The play doesn’t criticize the notion of fighting the English for a unified Ireland, but it satirizes stereotypes of honorable terrorists by criticizing the brutality of their methods and questioning how bombing civilians is a relevant or effective tactic. Set in the idyllic rural Irish countryside, as is common in sentimental representations of Ireland, McDonagh recontextualizes Padraic and his “friends” by taking them out of the conflicted territory of Northern Ireland to expose the absurdity of terrorist violence. In the kitchen of Donny’s quaint Irish cottage, the bloodbath is out of place. But a bloodbath should also be out of place in a pub or a supermarket, where a hidden bomb could turn any everyday scene into carnage.
The play also asks how terrorists are created, and comedy arises from the illogical and sometimes vacant morality of characters who are desensitized to the shocking violence that surrounds them. “Mad” Padraic, who strikes fear in Davey and Donny before he even walks onstage, seems to be pathologically violent, redirecting his serial-killer tendencies into the patriotic fight. But when he answers his phone, Padraic chats casually with his dad about torturing a man and bombing chip shops, arguing with unsolicited fatherly advice. The overarching irony in the play is that “Mad” Padraic, who can slice off a man’s nipple without wincing, adores his pet cat. His immediate response to learning about his cat’s death is that he must murder whoever is responsible, even his father. As a child, he severely injured his cousin, a story that makes him sound irredeemably violent—except the cousin was laughing at a scarf he liked to wear for being feminine. Wee Thomas has been his only friend for 15 years, which suggests that Padraic was a lonely kid. Leaving a rural town for bigger things is a common trope, but if Padraic was teased as a child for not being masculine enough, the INLA would impose masculinity on him so that his manhood wouldn’t be questioned again. After five years with the organization, his reflex solution to anger is to kill or torture.
Mairead seeks the same escape as Padraic into the INLA, as she is tired of being belittled for being a girl. Her mother has been expecting it, and her parting words to Mairead are: “try not to go blowing up kids” (57), a reference to the two young boys who were killed in the 1993 IRA bombing in Warrington. Donny and Davey chat casually about the differences between the IRA and the INLA, making bemused quips about their real-life victims. The play exposes the underlying effects of living in a society after decades of random violence, where becoming a terrorist is a worthwhile aspiration. Their detachment about killing humans is contagious, as are the play’s dark jokes about the real victims of terrorism, inviting audiences to partake in irreverent laughter. The terrorists use empty rhetoric about Irish/English history and freeing Ireland that shows a less than nominal familiarity with the villains, heroes, and significant events behind their movement, which means that they can be filled out with any meaning that is convenient at the moment. To appease their skewed morality, Christy motivates his men by claiming that the British kill cats. Representations of violence against humans are normal and expected, but even desensitized audiences tend to be squeamish about the deaths of animals in performance. The play encourages audiences to rethink their own distorted morality and to consider the real victims of terrorism and how society can become sensitized again to unnecessary violence and death.
Related Titles
By Martin McDonagh
