Lieutenant of Inishmore

For my birthday this week I was taken to see Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore. McDonagh is one of my favourite screenwriters, responsible for the peerless In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It wasn’t until a few years ago though that I discovered his reputation originated in theatre. This realisation came when I went with my brother to see his new play Hangmen at West End’s Wyndham Theatre. Like all of McDonagh’s work, the piece was dark and comedic. Set at a time when capital punishment is coming to an end, the play centres on Harry Wade, Britain’s second most famous hangman, and his professional jealousy of Albert Pierrepoint, the executioner famed for hanging Nazis.

Hearing Wade complain over Pierrepoint getting the Nazi gig (it made him a national hero and took his tally passed his competitor) highlighted how hangmen weren’t anonymous cogs in a justice machine, rather vain anecdotalists, desperate to extend their brand by boasting about their role in the death trade. Amongst all the hilarious point scoring between hangmen, there’s a message about how killing – justified or not – makes monsters of us all. This is McDonagh’s calling card: he smuggles profound anti-violent messages through violent characters. The reason despots are sensitive to satirists is because the worst thing you can do to is laugh at them. If people think they’re ridiculous, then all power is lost. McDonagh recognises this and delights in challenging them.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore was written in 1994 but not staged until 2001. It’s set in 1993, a tumultuous year of IRA bombings and retaliations. As an Englishman, it would be remiss of me to explain the problems in Ireland (I don’t want to occupy territory that’s not mine – this, after all, is where the problem started), but needless to say Cromwell, Bloody Sunday and Shankill Road are cornerstones of Irish history. McDonagh was born in London to Irish parents, spending his summer holidays in Ireland; he’s therefore both insider and outsider, knowledgeable on the land, but not so allied to support it.

The play opens with a body being brought into a living room. A cat. A decapitated cat. A moggy missing a head. A meow short of a mouth. Davey (Chris Walley) whose brought it in is upset. When you take your bike out for a ride you don’t expect to come across such a scene. Donny (Denis Conway), whose living room we’re in, is beyond upset. The cat didn’t belong to him; he was just minding it. Its owner is Padraic (Aidan Turner), Donny’s son. Typically, the son fears the father, but here it’s the other way round. The reason? Padraic is a headcase. Whilst his cat has no head, Padraic has no brains. He is a man of gut and instincts, a mad man that's deemed too insane for the IRA. Unable to be official, he's a member of the unofficial INLA, a splinter group that when asked about peace would likely invoke Tybalt: 'Peace, I do hate the word.'

I won't make a joke about these upstanding gentlemen in case anyone from the organisation is reading.

To illustrate how deranged Padraic is, we’re led into a scene where a man is suspended from the rafters. Padraic isn’t happy that this man, James, is pushing drugs on Ireland’s youth population. How can freedom for Ireland be achieved when teenage boys are too comatose to realise it? People need to be hungry for independence, not Doritos. Padraic pontificates over what nipple to take first, but then the phone rings. Dad, I’m busy at work. Herein lies McDonagh’s genius. The incongruous dialogue of the workplace against the true reality of what the ‘work’ entails is hilarious. When Donny spins a lie that his cat is unwell (the plan is to exacerbate the cat’s illness week by week to let Padraic down gently), we witness another juxtaposition as a psychopath dissolves into a blubbering mess. In a wonderful piece of direction, James takes advantage of his tormentor’s vulnerability, circling him with his hands, concocting commiserations and explaining that it’s probably just ringworm and Wee Thomas will be right as rain in no time. McDonagh knows his way to a joke, having James instruct Padraic on how best to apply the medical treatment whilst suspended in mid-air. Hearing pally chitchat during a torture scene had us all in pieces.

From here, Padraic vows to return home immediately to attend to his ‘ailing’ friend. This obviously is not what Donny and Davey wanted to hear. Why couldn’t the mad bastard just wait to come home? Why couldn’t he prioritise the bombing of Ulster chip shops over his stupid cat? The farce that follows is the stuff of sitcom. Donny and Davey are from the Father Ted school of crisis management, so their plan to resurrect a dead cat is doomed to failure. Also, ensuring that Padraic’s day is about to get worse is the arrival of INLA members. That fellar suspended from the rafters was one of their own. Much of the INLA’s funding came from the supply and distribution of drugs. They aren’t best pleased that Padraic hasn’t followed the party line. When the curtain comes down at the end of Act 1, we know we’re set up for a reckoning: that the splattered brains of Wee Thomas is Coleridge’s albatross, an omen for things to come.

Aye, it's that fellar from Poldark. That programme your ma watches.

Even though what I’m about to say might seem absurd, I believe it to be true. In my mind, the problem of the second act is that it’s too funny. Much of the dialogue is set-up/punchline/repeat, which proves exhausting. It’s not that there’s not variety in the jokes: every type of joke is covered. In fact many comedy shows in Edinburgh won’t come close in terms of laughs per minute. There’s wordplay, sight gags, surreal arguments over quotations and whimsical references to brand names (Frosties). What I felt was lacking was tonal variety. Family Guy might have more jokes than The Office but it isn’t a better comedy. It isn’t a better comedy because there’s not the character development that there is in the latter. What’s special about McDonagh’s later work is he’s married the jokes with rounded characters.

As an early look at McDonagh’s work though, I couldn’t recommend Lieutenant of Inishmore enough. Everyone in the audience, including me, had a great time and laughed more at this than most stand-up. It’s just his later work is superior in terms of characterisation. If this 90’s work is Lieutenant, then McDonagh’s recent output is Admiral, a rank above. With a new play out in November, I can’t wait to see what he does next.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is booking until 8^th September.

Leave No Trace

I appreciate that if you were to deconstruct my blogs into frequency words then Mark Kermode would come out a lot. Well, this article is no different as I’m mentioning the great man again. Just over a month ago he reviewed Leave No Trace, a film he labelled ‘his favourite of the year.’ At the end of his eulogising, he said he saw no reason why it wouldn’t feature high on his end of year list as well.

Obviously his rhapsody piqued my interest, but so too did hearing the filmmaker’s name. Director Debra Granik was behind 2010’s Winter’s Bone, a feature that propelled twenty-year old Jennifer Lawrence into Oscar contention. Set in the Ozarks of rural Missouri, Granik’s film centred on a young woman forced to grow up prematurely. The mother is unwell; the father absconded, addiction the root cause; the eldest child must therefore become both and assume responsibility for her younger siblings. The older sibling fighting to keep her family afloat clearly prefigures Katniss Everdeen, the role that would make Lawrence famous. 

The film that made people sit up and take notice.

Leave No Trace follows a similar template in that it’s set in an environment that’s often overlooked in cinema, encompassing lives frequently undocumented. Thematically, it continues on from Granik’s 2014 documentary Stray Dogs, which looked at the psychological impact of war on veterans. Given it’s an independent picture, there weren’t many showings in my local world of cine, as a result I asked The Girl if she would take me to Berkhamsted’s Art Deco picturehouse The Rex for my birthday.

Based on Peter Rock’s novel My Abandonment, the film tells the story of a teenage girl, Tom, and her father, Will, living in a forest park just outside Portland, Oregon. From the beginning it’s clear that the two work in symbiosis. When it's required, theirs is a wordless relationship: tasks are assigned with a glance, love signalled with a chirp, obstacles overcome without direction. Characteristically, they are more like animals, building their nest, protecting their own, disinterested in man-made concerns. Why they are living this way becomes apparent when the pair makes a rare venture into the city for supplies. To afford the basic provisions they need, Will sells his PTSD medication to other afflicted Vets.

Thomasin Mackenzie and Ben Foster are incredible in Leave No Trace.

In an interesting sequence, a hurtling rain makes it impossible for Will to light a cooking fire. His daughter responds by turning to their gas canister for heat. Will isn’t happy about this, but in a rare act of rebellion Tom goes ahead. On a practical level you could see this scene about preservation: Will as a father may be aware that resources are scarce, that they should only be used in an emergency. However, it also seems indicative of Will’s desire to be self-sufficient and avoid consumer products. Indeed their life isn’t touched by corporatism, being as it’s the campfire life of early settlers. Tom enjoys playing chess with her father, and Will derives pleasure from nighttime reading – their world is physical and collaborative, deliberately isolated from the digital self-centredness existing a few miles away. Unfortunately for Will his guerrilla outpost isn’t fortified from invaders. Soon the two have been found with difficult questions asked around Will’s fitness to father: How can you care properly for a child in an environment open to the elements? Should a teenager be sleeping next to their parent, albeit in a tent? For father and daughter, the questions are absurd: they’re living away from institutional wisdom, meaning societal rules shouldn’t apply. For the authorities, Will's method of parenting is illegal, a threat to his daughter's health.

The moment where Will and Tom is found could have lapsed into broad stroke Us v Them cliche. What’s special about this film is that it sympathises with everyone’s position. If you were a social worker wouldn’t you want a child to have a roof over their head, a desk at school, a fire in the hearth? Comparable movies Captain Fantastic and Hunt for the Wilderpeople deal with similar stories: people living off grid at war with bureaucratic suits - what these films don’t do is let the audience decide for themselves. In these pictures the protagonists and antagonists are clear, whereas in Leave No Trace we ask questions of our heroes. If it wasn’t for the opening twenty minutes where we see the closeness and happiness of father-daughter, we would feel that Will is irresponsible, living out a hermit fantasy to the detriment of his girl’s socialisation.

Both cracking films.

Having to adapt to their new world is fascinating. Granik documents how the forces of media, religion and education threaten Will’s desire for a child that can think freely. The question of why he’s so opposed to institutions must stem from what America’s machinery has done to him. The education that he was given did not teach him to question his nation's foreign policy; the religion he accepted taught him that God was an ally in war; the media hugged him off to war and then cold-shouldered when he returned. Although war doesn’t feature in the film, for what it has done to Will it must be considered a great anti-war movie.

Granik’s Leave No Trace is a painful study of how war makes people disappear completely. In carrying out global wars of expansionism and colonialism, returning soldiers ironically make tiny worlds for themselves. Ultimately, these prisons prove impenetrable to love, hope and sense. When you reach the end of the movie and see what happens to Will and Tom, your heart might just break.

Leave No Trace is still on in some cinemas.

Content Provider

‘No one is equipped to review me.’

(Stewart Lee, 2015.)

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a comedian in possession of a good humour must be in want of a TV deal.

For the comics that routinely leave the stage to rapturous applause, TV executives wait in the wings, plotting how best to repackage the sweat and salt into shine and polish. Often the gig they’re given is a world away from stand up. Just look at Romesh Ranganathan’s output: travelogue, sports panel show, and now judge on Dave’s Judge Romesh. TV wants stand ups, but they don’t want them doing stand up. The viewing figures for Michael McIntyre’s Big Show are far higher than Live at the Apollo­, proving that comics as entertainers, as opposed to comics as comics, ensures ratings.

He's not a real judge.

The comedian that bucks this trend is Stewart Lee. The comedy vehicle he was given wasn’t an squabbling travel show, where a parent with questionable views is pitted alongside their exasperated offspring for LOLS; nor a late night chat show, where the host talks to a depreciating grade of celebrity until the plug is pulled. No, the comedy vehicle stand up comedian Stewart Lee was given was a stand up one. Not since Dave Allen in the 70’s and 80’s had television commissioned a series where a comic could be a comic. In Allen’s seminal series he combined sketches and routines, typically on one topic, over the course of half an hour. Lee more or less adopted this structure for the first series of the knowingly named Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. Over the series the format changed slightly, dispensing with the sketches that punctuated the stand up, placing instead interrogation scenes where Lee was challenged on his material. (These Grand Inquisitors were played by Armando Iannucci in Series 2 and Chris Morris in Series 3 and 4.) The programme was a commercial success and relatively cheap to make, therefore it's no surprise the BBC didn’t recommission it for a fifth series.

Although in many ways they have.

Dave Allen.

Stewart Lee’s Content Provider is the fifth series in all but name. Initially, the tour show was made with a live audience – not TV one- in mind. However, with it being green-lit by the BBC, Lee brings back the tropes he invented first time round: the Grand Inquisitor returns, this time in the form of Watchmen creator Alan Moore, and the fourth wall doesn’t so much get broken, but bulldozed. Like a possessed Exorcist spirit, Lee's head is in constant rotation, working the audience in front of him and those at home.

The show begins with the comic in a darkened room, waiting on his adversary. Footsteps are heard. A chair is taken. Alan Moore sits himself opposite; his face bad cop-bad cop. Lee, typically smug and conceited, is on the back foot, disarmed by the frown facing him. The Headteacher’s reproach begins. Who are you and what do you think you’re doing? Like a callow youth, Lee bends to his master, conceding that he shouldn’t be back on our screens, that his work isn’t fit for public consumption. These Kafkaesque inquisitions are so important to Lee’s show as they remind us of his underdog status. Sure, he’s playing to a packed audience; yes, he’s got a TV commission, but in the grand scheme of things he’s an unknown. Show a member of the public a picture of him and they’re as likely to say ‘Leonard Di Caprio’s let himself go’ as they are to say, ‘That’s critically acclaimed comedian Stewart Lee.’ For the arrogant character of Stewart Lee to work, we have to believe his author doesn’t hold power. He’s Lear on the heath, railing against his position in society. A king in a kingdom that doesn't acknowledge he's king.

We cut away from Lee’s cross-examining to see him appear on stage with the painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, a nineteenth century piece of art serving as a metaphor for man’s place in a confused world. Lee tells us that he wanted to use it to explore an individual’s role in a digitised time; however Brexit happened, then he felt like people would want him to comment on that. But how do you create a tour show, whose receipts will feed your family, about a situation that’s in constant flux? Lee explains his lack of Brexit material with, ‘I don’t see the point of committing to a course of action which has no logical or financial justification.’ There’s not many comics that get a punchline out of such syntactical elegance. It’s also why Lee is not for everyone. You have to concentrate when listening to his comedy. David Simon, writer of The Wire, said he didn’t want his programme to be consumed but watched. ‘Fuck the casual viewer’ was his mission statement, and in many ways Lee’s too. Better to be loved by a few than kind-of-liked by many.

A Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

Although Lee claims he hasn’t got any Brexit jokes, he spends his opening twenty satirising the political players who've orchestrated the funeral march. Here, he uses popular comedy techniques of ‘rule of three’ and ‘pull back and reveal’ to create a punchy, raucous beginning. This bit allows Lee to tell his audience that he can do jokes, but just chooses not to. Towards the end of this segment, he deliberately derails his train of thought, and criticises the crowd for not buying into a joke. Now, this is just a contrivance. The set has been going well and the material well received. The reason he lambasts the audience is for tension. Comedy necessitates tension. Without tension there can’t be release. Release is the stuff of laughter. Lee has to feign struggle, otherwise his low status persona won’t get away with the things it says. In promoting himself as critically acclaimed, he has to prove how publicly he’s not; this ensures his boasts appear hollow, of little worth.

In disturbing the rhythm of his comedy, Lee positions himself as an alternative comedian. He’s not working to the same beats as other comics, rather he’s playing with form and tension in a style more akin to Jazz than plodding rock n’ roll. Although this sounds pretentious, it’s a breath of fresh air to comedy fans. It’s not always the case of predicting the punch-line when it comes to comedians, but you can at least guess where the joke is going to be. Having someone move beyond conventional joke structure to do something more theatrical with character and status is infinitely more interesting and nourishing.

The stage set up for Content Provider has Lee as island man, marooned against a sea of comedy DVD’s. Wittingly, he’s physicalising how he stands apart from the stand up crowd. These props allow him to move onto the central thrust of the show: how the physical has become redundant in our digital world. The DVD’s that used to be bought for fifteen pounds at Christmas are now being sold for a penny. It makes more financial sense for a comedian to buy their own DVD second-hand and sell them as brand new, then it does to flog their originals and have the tax man and production companies cream off the profits. The idea of a comic buying their own DVD’s is absurd and again reminds the audience that Lee isn’t Carr or McIntyre. In fact, the joke that follows about Jimmy Carr buying his own DVD is one of the best of the evening, challenging Britain’s favourite entertainers and their rampant capitalism.

Island Man. Pic. courtesy of BBC/Awkward Films/Steve Ullathorne

His families incredulity towards his success ends the first half – another nail in the coffin of Lee’s ego; then we’re back in the interrogation room with Moore asking: ‘What do you do during the interval? Cry? Comfort eat?’ It’s all a cumulative distraction piece: the audience not getting the joke; his family not valuing his comedy; Moore criticising the material. All of this falsifying failure is from the Tommy Cooper playbook: appear like you’re getting it wrong when in fact you’re getting it very right.

The second half of the show again reminds the audience about the painting. (Lee knows this memory will be important for later). He tells us that he wanted to explore an individual’s role in a digitised world, but then Donald Trump happened, and people wanted him to write about that. You can probably already see how the second half begins in the same way as the first: the punchlines are the same, but the subject has changed. Structurally, Lee is in a class of his own. This parallelism isn’t a technique that will ever concern Joe Pasquale, but it isn’t solely there for art's sake. The replication gives the piece a feeling of unity and serves as a metaphor for a world that doesn’t heed the mistakes of the past, but continues to repeat them.

Lee holds the under-40’s responsible for the state we’re in. Yes, the old voted for Brexit and the Conservatives, but the young were compliant in allowing it to happen. The exaggerated mimicry of a young person is sublime here and shows we’re not just witnessing a verbal masterclass, but a physical one too. Some great gags about Game of Thrones are thrown in, which set up some momentum for the protracted ending. This is a shaggy dog story of how his grandparents couldn’t just click online for deviant sex; instead they had to travel far and wide to gather the materials needed to make it happen. Fans of the comic might recall the Give it to me straight routine when listening to this. Even though you know the tale is tall, you invest in it anyway. It’s the level of detail that Lee puts into the description that mean you are assimilated – not alienated – by the artifice at work.

As for the very end, Lee brings that painting back. And the way he subverts its meaning is so profound and clever that you’ll want to get off your seat and applaud.  

Content Provider is the ironic title of a majestical piece of work. It uses a work of art to show how art is overlooked today. Its message seems to be that instead of admiring an artist’s work, we spoil it by using it to promote ourselves. Maybe in writing this blog I’m guilty of that: Am I trying to earn cool points by celebrating something cultish? Am I trying to receive some reflected glory by praising it? I hope not. What I’m trying do is urge you the gallery to put down your phones, take a good long look at Content Provider, and admire the work of an artist. For in a career spanning thirty years, this might just be Lee's masterpiece.

Content Provider is on iPlayer.