JiggyJay's Full Review: Martin McDonagh - The Cripple of Inishmaan
Martin McDonagh is one of those great playwrights where seemingly each one of his plays he just proves again how influential he is to the circuit. While he sort of had a misstep with The Beauty Queen of Leenane, his second play, which is the first in his Aran Islands trilogy (which continues with The Lieutenant of Inishmore and finishing with a third that is yet to be published).
The Cripple of Inishmaan takes place in the 30s in the island off the coast of Ireland known as Inishmore where a Hollywood director is filming his latest movie where everyone is so excited, but one that seems to be more excited than the rest is young Billy, who’s an eccentric handicapped boy. His dream is to be a part of the movie and he’ll stop at nothing to visit the set and try and win a part, but the people in his life that look after him will stop at nothing to hold him from doing it for his own good.
The play plays out mainly with you viewing scenes with a ton of woman gossiping about what’s going on in town and giving you hints on the movie that’s in progress and rumors going crazy all over the island. Billy, I’d say, isn’t really a central character, but it’s his story as everyone’s talking about him and in saying that, it’s not a pleasant sight. There are many times when the rude townfolk refer to him with rude names and make fun of him and it even had me uncomfortable at times with its tongue-in-cheek nature of trying to get humor across. It really points out just how far McDonagh is willing to push the envelope to the reader.
Since this was the fourth play that McDonagh published, you can clearly see him leaps and bounds above the previous series that he published (under The Beauty Queen of Leenane). His voice really got polished here. Instead of going off on many tangents, he stayed put and really focused a lot of his black satire into the dialogue at hand, which I really respected.
What makes McDonagh such a great author is just how much he engages you with the characters and while that can be hard at times due to the thick Irish overtones (since his is, in fact, Old Irish) making it hard to read, you pretty much get the gist of what the characters are talking about. Due to McDonagh’s reputation and the rest of the plays I’ve read by him, it was no surprise that this one was one was a dark comedy. He tackles the subjects of rudeness, being handicapped, and being a homebody and he describes all of the characters through dialogue in such ease that it appears effortless.
I’d say that if you were to read any Martin McDonagh book, I’d recommend The Pillowman first off, but afterwards I would definitely advise you to give this a try since it’s a very entertaining piece that is a much different piece of cake than the murder mystery that is The Pillowman. The thick Irish dialogue coupled with the rural story and an original plot full of twists and interesting developments, made it not only a great read, but one that went by very quickly and one that I will definitely revisit in the future.
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