McDonagh weaves the strands of his plot together with superb panache and his dialogue is a joy, full of debunking humor that reveals the terrorists in their absurdly dim true colors.
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.
The plot is so sublime, the script so witty and the twist at the end so clever that I was won over...
“Gleeful, gruesome play about political terrorism in rural Ireland, which won the Olivier Award for best comedy...Appallingly entertaining...Enlightening...Lieutenant is brazenly and unapologetically a farce. But it is also a severely moral play, translating into dizzy absurdism the self-perpetuating spirals of political violence that now occur throughout the world.” —The New York Times
“A cautionary fairy tale for our toxic times. In its horror and hilarity, it works as an act of both revenge and repair, turning the tables on grief and goonery, and forcing the audience to think about the unthinkable.” —The New Yorker
“There's more than one way to skin a theatrical cat; and McDonagh's chosen weapons are laughter and gore Pushing theatre to its limits, McDonagh is making a serious point a work as subversive as those Synge and O'Casey plays that sparked Dublin riots in the last century.” —Guardian
“A brave satire Swiftianly savage and parodic with explicit brutal actino and lines which sing with grace and wit.” —Observer
A brave satire Swiftianly savage and parodic with explicit brutal actino and lines which sing with grace and wit.
There's more than one way to skin a theatrical cat; and McDonagh's chosen weapons are laughter and gore Pushing theatre to its limits, McDonagh is making a serious point a work as subversive as those Synge and O'Casey plays that sparked Dublin riots in the last century.
A cautionary fairy tale for our toxic times. In its horror and hilarity, it works as an act of both revenge and repair, turning the tables on grief and goonery, and forcing the audience to think about the unthinkable.
Gleeful, gruesome play about political terrorism in rural Ireland, which won the Olivier Award for best comedy...Appallingly entertaining...Enlightening...Lieutenant is brazenly and unapologetically a farce. But it is also a severely moral play, translating into dizzy absurdism the self-perpetuating spirals of political violence that now occur throughout the world.
In the person of a man who can break off from torturing a chain-suspended victim to have a fretful mobile phone conversation about the health of his cat, McDonagh makes mock of the psychotic sentimentality of Irish nationalist terrorism.
