The Cripple of Inishmaan

Gaiety Theatre, Dublin

How soon into Martin McDonagh's 1997 play does its vision of 1930s Ireland become less than scrupulously authentic? "Is Billy not yet home?" "Not yet is Billy home." That'll do. Such corkscrew syntax exists only in McDonagh's imagined Ireland, where the vernacular is somewhere between Synge and Yoda. The Cripple of Inishmaan, however, is deliberately unreal, constantly playing games with truth and distortion.

Set during the filming of Robert Flaherty's Man of Aranin 1934, there's a rich seam of caustic humour in its premise, satirising Ireland's insecurities, its image abroad and its willingness to be exploited. "Ireland mustn't be such a bad place, so," reasons island gossip JohnnyPateenMike (Dermot Crowley), "if the Yanks want to come here to do their filming." Flaherty's film was beautiful, often entertaining and preposterously unreal. The same can be said for Druid and Atlantic Theater Company's co-produced revival of The Cripple.

Clerical child abuse, wasting disease, physical violence and casual cruelty are the daily bread of this island (and real scars on Irish culture). But when its inhabitants seem either infantile or monstrous – from Laurence Kinlan’s sweetie-obsessed Bartley to Clare Dunne’s egg-pelting love interest – there’s no shock of exposed taboos, no tang of revealed hypocrisy, just a cynical cackle.

McDonagh mustn’t be such a shallow playwright, so, if a director as brilliant as Garry Hynes wants to stage his drama, yet there is a curious struggle between production and play. Performed by Tadhg Murphy as an endearingly wide-eyed naïf with a body as tangled as his grammar, we are meant to feel something for the mysteriously orphaned, terminally-ill, eternally hopeful Cripple Billy. But, shoved around with delayed exposition and unearned plot twists, his author clearly doesn’t. It is an ersatz world that denies investment; as cruel and twisted as a puppet show.

Francis O’Connor’s set recognises this perfectly, beautifully poised between the real and abstract, where a rickety shop and strandline are submerged in Davy Cunningham’s iridescent green hues. Hynes leads most of her cast towards a similarly impressive balance. Ingrid Craigie and Dearbhla Molloy make a fittingly absurd double-act as Billy’s adoptive aunties, Dunne is an inexplicably attractive psychopath, but two actors have such difficulty with the west of Ireland accent, hitting Jamaican and Scotch-Bronx respectively, that it unbalances the ensemble.

Even in a play whose obvious caricatures and megaphone ironies seem to announce its own critique, this is a distracting problem, and Hynes’s strange decision to remove the most shocking and considered moment of her 2008 production – a blood-spattered movie screen – thickens the suspicion that the play won’t bear close attention. Billy, it spoils nothing to know, gives up on Hollywood, a place of fakes and falsity, for McDonagh’s rancorous Inishmaan. How can he tell the difference?

Until Mar 5