Padraic is a ruthless Irish Liberation Army enforcer, and the one thing he loves more than anything else in the world: his little black cat, Wee Thomas. When Wee Thomas is found dead on a lonely country road, the terrorist in Padraic wants someone to pay for kitty’s execution - just as soon as he’s returned from his torture and chip-shop bombing stints in Northern Ireland. The Lieutenant of Inishmore explodes onto the Vertigo Studio stage March 14th – 29th with love, guns, blood, and the difficult to master Irish accent.
“My friend you don’t have to tell me! We have a fantastic actor/director Pat Benadict who is straight from Ireland herself. She is working very intently with all of us being militant with our Irish accents. That right there is a challenge to master that dialect,” Ground Zero Theatre’s Ryan Luhning told GayCalgary and Edmonton Magazine. “We are having a great time with it so far. That isn’t even the basement of the iceberg of the challenges of this show.”
Ground Zero Theatre & Hit and Myth Productions brought Calgary Urinetown, The Full Monty and Cocktales. While all of those shows were challenging in their own right, they weren’t quite as… bloody as a season that includes this show as well as Evil Dead: The Musical this May.
“When we went into last season, I specifically was coming off of performing in The Pillowman and living in that world, and also having new babies, I felt there wasn’t enough light in the world. So we made an effort to lighten up and appeal to a more mass audience. There were some rumblings that GZT had gone soft. So going into this season it was a conscious effort on a lot of parts to get back to the roots of the company. I have always based my company on not only creating challenges for our audience but for the creative people that go into the work. Not only are these challenging works for the audience but extremely challenging for the artists as well.”
For this show, GZT has teamed up with special effects company Bleeding Art Industries to maximize the effect.
“This script deals with a lot of technical problems, and rather than do a half assed job of it we decided to go all the way, and they can do some great visual effects that we just couldn’t do,” he explained. “The play opens up and onstage is a dead cat. Right from the get-go you are looking at the authenticity of creating what looks like a real cat. There are effects in the show where there are actors hanging upside down, there is a gun battle onstage, like what you would see in an action movie, and people do get shot. There is a certain realistic effect with the show that you want to go for. Martin McDonough has written a very anti-violent play by using a lot of violence to get his point across. So as the play moves on its journey, it gets more and more comedically violent to show not only how ridiculous the situation is, but in society how ridiculous a means it is to justify your ends. By the end of the play when everything has turned into a mess, it has reached such a climactic point and taken the audience on such a ride. That is why we brought bleeding arts into the mix because it has to be realistic and comedic, an almost heightened realism.”
The show is written by Martin McDonagh, the author of The Pillowman.
“The very first McDonagh play I read was The Lieutenant of Inishmore back in 2003. If you ever read any of his works you can sense by his style he is probably the greatest playwrite of our generation. His scripts are so well crafted and touch on things that most people wouldn’t even touch. This play was written back in 2001 and it was commissioned by the Royal Court Theatre. They are the home of the risky, more unconventional work, and they said to him, ‘We can’t produce this. It is way too hardcore and difficult technically. We can’t do it.’ It ended up being the Royal Shakespeare Company that did it.
If you enjoy action movies, you will enjoy this “love story… with guns” which has been described as “Monty Python meets Quentin Tarantino.”
“It is a fantastic story about the state of our world and violence in our society. It is not only a challenge for the actors, but for the audience as well because it is such a raucous ride. You are pretty much going to see an action movie on stage. It is something that Calgary theatre goers have never seen before, I guarantee that. We are about ‘event theatre.’ What sets us aside from a normal play is that it is an event, and something people will not forget.”
