The Lieutenant of Inishmore

The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a play by Martin McDonagh, was first produced in 2001 by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon before moving to the Garrick Theatre in London’s West End. In 2006, the play premiered Off-Broadway (winning the Obie and Lortel Awards) and then on Broadway, where it won a Tony nomination for Best Play. McDonagh is a British-Irish playwright and screenwriter who is well-known for his absurdist, farcical, black-comedy style and his early plays about Ireland. The Lieutenant of Inishmore is the second play in his Aran Islands Trilogy, which begins with The Cripple of Inishmaan (1997) and ends with The Banshees of Inisherin, which was unpublished and unproduced on stage but was adapted as a 2022 film starring Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell.

Of McDonagh’s plays, The Lieutenant of Inishmore is arguably his most controversial. It was written in response to the Warrington bombings in 1993, in which the Irish Republican Army (IRA) detonated two bombs that injured 56 people and killed two young children. As a proponent of a free, decolonized Ireland, McDonagh was outraged at the violence that paramilitary organizations were committing ostensibly in his name. McDonagh wrote from, as he described, a

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