The Lieutenant Of Inishmore: Funny, tragic, disturbingIt is all there: the green hill, the sheep, the gun… The unavoidable symbols of Ireland, visualized in the minimalist set design by Željko Piškorić, which can also be interpreted as an Earth’s hemisphere, suggesting that the story told by Martin McDonagh and the Yorick troupe, at the level of a global metaphor, is not just a story about some Irish backwater in which the violence is the everyday folklore, but also a story about the world we live in. And, first of all, “The Lieutenant Of Inishmore” of the contemporary British playwright Martin McDonagh, directed by Žanko Tomić is – in every respect – the most mature and complete work of this Novi Sad troupe to date. It is a play which has every quality of Tomić’s style of directing: the engagement, the precision of reading the original text, a good cooperation with the actors, the appropriate rhythm and the imaginative theatricalization, without any digressions.
McDonagh, whose dramatic opus is classified by theoreticians as the aesthetics of “blood an sperm”, talks about the brutality of violence and its absurd, most often “collateral” and, hence, even more tragic, victims, with the poetics based on dark humor which makes us laugh, which upsets us and disturbs us. In this specific case, McDonagh’s critical blade is pointed at the hypocrisy of the fundamental basis of “moral” norms of the contemporary civilization and its system of values which in practice significantly deviates from the proclaimed one, at least when human life is concerned. By interpreting the main character of the neurotic self-proclaimed lieutenant, who will, upon the news of the death of his beloved cat, set in motion a whole mechanism of murders, Milorad Kapor portrayed his best, most complex and most mature role to date. His Padraic is convincing both in the scenes of “insanity” and in the scenes we could call lyrical (rough-gentle romantic scenes), as well as during the moments when he, ready to kill his own father, sheds sincere tears over his cat.
Miroslav Fabri as Donny (it is enough to see him in the scene over his dead son, devoid of any pathos and, seemingly, of emotion) and Milovan Filipović as Davey (his one-tone verbal intonation causes both laughers and empathy) make a brilliant team. Kristina Radenković as Mairead, Padraic’s female counterpart and the one who continues his “strategy”, is skillfully balancing between the femininity and the insane cruelty, and, giving their – in the text not particularly differentiated – characters a touch of uniqueness and true dramatic features, Ninoslav Đorđević, Dragan Stojmenović, Ivan Đurić and Marko Marković achieve finely nuanced and humorous episodes. The pure and stylistically consistent poetics of the play is greatly supported, besides the actors and the set designer, by the costume maker Jovana Despić, as well as by the exciting and, in this case, occasional ironic connotations of Irish music, chosen by the director himself.
D. Nikolić, DNEVNIK