Pitch-black comedy is a triumph

“THE CRIPPLE OF INISHMAAN” (Lowry, Salford)

THIS Druid Theatre production of the first of Martin McDonagh’s Aran Islands trilogy is on at the Lowry until Saturday. There are tickets; I urge you to go.

For this is one of few chances to see a stunning, pitch-black comedy by the man who by common consent is the finest Anglo-Irish playwright of his generation.

McDonagh grew up in London with Irish parents but writes about the rural Irish mind and speech like few others: it’s Father Ted, as written by Samuel Beckett. Only crueller.

Set in the mid-1930s, the story is sparked by the real-life coming to Inishmaan’s neighbouring Island of an American director to make the film documentary “Men of Aran”.

In Inishmaan this is big news — the other major item of the day’s news round-up, by gossipmonger Johnnypateenmike, is an impending feud over a goose.

Young Cripple Billy — the heartless name is an unfeeling statement of fact; he has deformed limbs — lies his way on to the boat to the filming with two friends. They return, he is whisked off to America for a screen test.

Is this Billy’s way out of the mind-numbing, small-island life that stretches before him?

Well no: he eventually returns — ironically, with the first signs of the disease he lied about to cadge the lift on the boat. He is back where he started, his chance of fame cruelly snatched away. But his crush on the insecure, violence-inclined local girl Helen might be going somewhere . . .

Cripple is full of laugh-out-loud lines, cheerfully devoid of politically-correct feelings and populated with a cast of characters most playwrights would spread around half a dozen plays, from Billy’s wonderfully mad adopted aunts, Kate and Eileen, through Helen’s gloriously vacant brother, Bartley, to Johnnypateenmike’s mother, a 90-year-old alcoholic he has been trying to get to drink herself to death for years.

The atmosphere is closed and bleak, but the ride is comedy like no other.

This production by Garry Hynes, with superlative performances by Aaron Monaghan as Billy, Kerry Condon as Helen, Dearbhla Molloy as aunt Eileen, David Pearse as Johnnypateeenmike and the rest of the wholly admirable cast, offers a night that makes you hope the other two plays in the trilogy will follow soon.