ABSTRACT
At the end of a performance of Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore at the Atlantic Theater in New York City, the woman next to me turned from a stage bathed in blood and littered with rubber (yet realistic enough) body parts and commented, “They looked like they were having fun.” It was an accurate assessment of the experience, from the first dribble of cat brains to the last blood-spattering execution; McDonagh has an odd way of using destruction to generate glee.1 In McDonagh’s repertoire The Lieutenant stands as the most unrelentingly violent and the most unrelentingly comic play, a piece that in fact turns the violence into play. Certainly McDonagh is not the only Irish dramatist to mix comedy and violence, which is a tactic popular from J. M. Synge to Marina Carr. Yet rather than alternating verbal comedy with unexpected moments of serious violence, McDonagh’s story of a mad gunman returned home to seek vengeance for the death of his beloved cat employs the violence as comedy; the rising body count and the gallons of stage blood (five a night in the New York production)2 become the literal substance of the escalating farce. Richard Hand and Michael Wilson’s study of the Grand Guignol Theatre in France argues that those famed horror productions purposely restrained their use of stage blood because too much gushing liquid would generate laughter rather than fear (60). When the lights went up on the final scene of The Lieutenant that evening, revealing a stage doused in red-not only the windows and door that were spattered in the previous scene but also the floor was now pooled in sticky liquid that dripped over the edge of the playing area-that dictum proved true: the audience responded with the loudest laughter of the evening.
