Blackbird
The Lieutenant of Inishmore
A Tampa Bay premiere!
On a lonely road on the tiny Irish island of Inishmore, someone has killed an Irish National Liberation Army enforcer's cat. The enforcer loves his cat more than life itself, and when he returns from a stint of torture and chip-shop bombing in Northern Ireland, someone is going to pay.
"You can't imagine how many dramatic developments, how much horror, how much comedy McDonagh spins as a consequence of [a] cat's death … his blackest, funniest, most violent, most absurd… play to date." – Financial Times
Author of Jobsite’s 2006 production of The Pillowman (credited as a Top 10 production by Creative Loafing, earned Steve Garland a Creative Loafing Best Actor of the Bay Award and scored four Jobsite Jobby Awards, including Best Play), Martin McDonagh returns to Jobsite for the third time with The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a gruesome high-octane comedy that won the Olivier Award for Best Comedy.
The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a stunningly, disturbingly funny tale of a young man and his cat. It’s a wickedly hilarious event utilizing a half-dozen stage firearms, approximately six gallons of stage blood per night and a slew of special effects rigs that must be seen to be believed.
McDonagh’s masterpiece is not an anti-terrorist play, but a satire of the nature of terrorism, which centers on “Mad Padraic” Osbourne, a first lieutenant in the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), a group that splintered from the IRA in the 1970’s owing to the IRA’s “overly moderate” outlook on the situation in the North.
Nothing is sacred to Padraic except his cat, Wee Thomas, and freeing Northern Ireland from the oppressive rule of England. When he learns that Wee Thomas is “doing poorly,” he rushes home to the Aran Island of Inishmore, only to find that his beloved friend is a biteen more than poorly – he’s, as the Irish would say, brownbread!
The resulting action blends the comic precision of a Feydeau farce with the non-apologetic graphic violence of a Tarantino flick, as Padraic contends with Mairead, a 16-year-old girl (who is crazy about him and can blind cows with a popgun from 60 yards), her brother Davey (who rides his mother’s pink bicycle), Padraic’s eccentric father Donny, and three fellow INLA members who are none-too-happy with Padraic.