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Many individuals, theatre professionals, critics, spectators, and academics alike have been divided by the merits of Martin McDonagh's theatre work, as both text and as presented in performance. No work has split people more than The Ueutenant oflnishmore (2001), which was initially produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and directed by Wilson Malam. The play's contentious and interrelated issues are the appropriateness of the contexualizations of Irishness as written and performed, the conceptualizations of violence in the play, and the way that the work deals with Republican politically motivated military campaigns or terrorism depending on one's point of view.
Attempting to unravel the complexities of the piece, I suggest that the limited and biased framing of the play by many critics and commentators in relation to history and politics, reality and authenticity, but not sufficiently in terms of the play's farcical form, has led not so much to an inappropriate, as to an inadequate range of critical responses. In order to shape my argument, however, I will provide a contextual background, to which the play replies, without it owing any obligation to reflect or consider that reality in any substantial way. This gives rise to complications in responses to either a textual or a performance analysis of the piece. So, it is important to understand the work's context without regarding the play as being obliged to fulfill a contextual imperative. Declan Hughes sees McDonagh as "a Connemara Orton" (Kurdi 76-77), and many commentators do mention Joe Orton or the conventions of farce in passing, but then fail to see through the details and implications of the McDonagh work in relation to farce, thus hindering the more complex and subtle actualities of the writing within the sensibility of farce. For McDonagh the text is, as he himself argues, "much more in the Joe Orton tradition than in any tradition of Irish drama. This is the furthest I'm going to push this whole violence, black-comedy thing, because I don't think it can get much blacker or more violent" (qtd. in Rosenthal par 9).
Elusive contexts
While set in the West of Ireland, The Lieutenant of Inishmore deals predominantly with Northern Irish issues that coalesce around justice, colonization, and paramilitary violence. The putative West of Ireland in McDonagh's...