The Cripple of Inishmaan
Synge’s plays also helped create a whole genre of Irish drama whose influence is still felt: bittersweet, rough-hewn tragedies and comedies whose hallmarks include lilting cadences and lyrical imagery, political pronouncements and nationalistic paeans, outbursts of “natural” sexual passion and brutal yet almost farcical violence, and an endless parade of colorfully named eccentrics. But Synge’s plays themselves are hardly formulaic or easy: the irreverent Playboy of the Western World prompted a riot at its 1908 Abbey Theatre premiere, and its subsequent popularity was partly the result of directors who played up its rustic romanticism and soft-pedaled what Abbey actress Marie Nic Shiubhlaigh called the work’s “nastiness.”
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Few will misunderstand the nastiness of The Cripple of Inishmaan, Martin McDonagh’s mordantly funny 1996 tragicomedy, receiving its local premiere from Northlight Theatre a year after its U.S. debut at New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theater. McDonagh, a skillful young British playwright of Irish descent and a fast-rising international star (Steppenwolf is staging his Beauty Queen of Leenane this summer), has turned the cliches of Irish drama on their heads, creating a work that, in director B.J. Jones’s deftly acted production, is at once accessible and aloof, hilarious and bleak. McDonagh’s small-minded, superstitious characters and the wretched, hopeless conditions under which they live are troubling long after the play ends, yet The Cripple of Inishmaan is too harsh and gritty to be “touching” in the usual sense; McDonagh’s sardonic, crisply rhythmic comic writing is informed by his awareness of life’s darkest, most painful aspects as well as of the literary conventions he undercuts.
What happens to Billy in America, and the impact on his friends and family at home when Man of Aran is released, occupies the second half of The Cripple of Inishmaan. Packed with multiple twists worthy of O. Henry on a binge, the protracted ending evolves naturally out of McDonagh’s assault on the audience’s expectations. Of course we want Billy to find fame and fortune–and to be cured of his TB, find out the truth about his parents’ death, and win the heart of Helen. McDonagh sets all these conflicting possibilities in motion, then resolves them with a chilly yet compassionate sense of truth in the unpredictable yet inevitable final result.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Michael Brosilow.
