Creeping sentiment

>> Centaur’s Cripple has too much heart

by AMY BARRATT

I’m going to be accused of never being satisfied for this.
In case anyone remembers, I was not so enamoured of The Beauty Queen of Leenane when it played Centaur in ’99. I whinged at the time that there was “no one to care about” in the play by Irish bad boy Martin McDonagh. I’ve since revised my opinion of that play: I still don’t care about the miserable old crone Mag and her psychotic daughter, but I am fascinated by them. Done properly, that play blurs the line between black comedy and tragedy.

Give me a couple of years, or a different production, and I may change my mind, but a day after seeing McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan, also at Centaur, I’m not convinced it’s a masterwork. I suspect, however, that the fault lies not with the play, but with the production.
Cripple is the first of a trilogy of plays set on the Aran Islands. Like Leenane, it is directed here by Ben Barnes of the Abbey theatre. The action takes place in 1934, and revolves around a real event, the arrival of documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty in the Aran Isles to shoot Man of Aran—classic “fillum” or boring piece of shite, depending on your point of view.

McDonagh juggles more characters, more settings and more plot in this sprawling piece than he did in Leenane. Inishmaan, a chunk of bare rock off the west coast of Ireland, is populated here by enough local colour to drive any halfway intelligent person to suicide. Eighteen-year-old Cripple Billy is intelligent and sensitive to boot—and there’s the rub. What’s Martin McDonagh doing writing a sensitive, dare I say, good-hearted, handicapped fella?

The McDonagh of Beauty Queen would never sentimentalize a handicapped person. He’d be more likely to make him the villain, as unattractive within as he is without. There’s a dangerously Hollywood-ish quality about this Billy, as portrayed by Philip Riccio. He’s on Inishmaan but not of it; he’s the starry-eyed conscience of the place, a slightly foul-mouthed Tiny Tim. Bollocks.

This is what I get for wishing for a character to care about. Now I wish Riccio and Barnes had come up with a Billy as unattractive as old Mag. Before we ever see Billy, there’s an exchange between the “aunties” who raised him—following the drowning deaths of his parents—where they agree that poor Billy’ll never be kissed. One of them says it’s a shame because if you look beyond his deformities, he does have “a sweet face.” The other one responds that no, he really doesn’t. Riccio does, unfortunately, have a rather sweet face, and his twisted “oh-what-a-great-acting-challenge” body never seems to give him any real trouble.

Guido Tondino’s set design is appropriately stark, but too grand in scale to convey the claustrophobia of living day to day on this miserable island.

Mark O’Regan, a ringer brought in from Ireland, steals the show as Johnnypateenmike, a latter-day village crier who spreads gossip, literally, for a living. Casting Carolyn Hetherington, who was Mag in Beauty Queen, as another ailing Mammy in this play was a nice touch. :

The Cripple of Inishmaan to June 2 at Centaur, $20–36, 288-3161