The Lieutenant of Inishmore

Throughout the play, the murderous Padraic’s soft spot for his kitty is an ongoing joke, but it’s also part of a larger motif in which pets are endowed with more humanity and intrinsic value than humans. Padraic and Mairead are the two most fervent cat lovers in the play, but all the characters assign human traits to cats. According to Mairead, “every cat has its own separate personality, sure, not to mention its eyes and its miaow” (20). Davey describes Sir Roger as “a snooty little bitch” (20) and takes it personally when his sister’s cat destroys his comic books, claiming that the feline did it purposefully. Conversely Wee Thomas “would always say hello to you were you to see him sitting on a wall” (6). Cats are even granted a role in the nationalist cause, often identified as “Irish cats” (28) who deserve to be free in a free Ireland. Padraic has built up Wee Thomas in his mind as a fellow revolutionary who encourages him to throw bombs. Sir Roger is named for an iconic revolutionary who was martyred for Irish republicanism, and he is martyred himself by Padraic. He isn’t the only martyr cat; according to Christy, Oliver Cromwell liked to murder innocent Irish cats, although he insists that cats sometimes have to be martyred because Joey must choose between “happy cats or […] an Ireland free” (30). Cat devotion in the play ranges from the relatable to the absurd, with no parallel concern for human death. The characters all recognize that killing a cat (or even contributing to a cat’s death) is a capital offense, at least within the world of terrorist vigilante justice, demonstrating materially that cat lives are worth more than human lives.

The cats in the play also serve as projections of the characters’ anxieties about gender, sexuality, and identity. There are no “boy-preferers” (33) allowed in the INLA, but being a cat lover in the world of the play makes a man’s sexual orientation suspect, and Padraic certainly loves his cat. The play is not implying that Padraic is secretly gay, but rather it’s challenging the rigid notions of gender and sexuality that create his anxieties and defensiveness about his own identity. Mairead insists that cats are unique, suggesting that their personalities are stable and recognizable, an idea that she is invested in, as though her appearance may fall somewhere between feminine and masculine, she is the same person whether she’s in a dress or pants. Sir Roger, that “snooty little bitch” (20), is named for an Irish rebel who was both a celebrated republican hero and a “boy-preferer.” Even Wee Thomas’s “identity” is in flux throughout the play, despite Padraic’s certainty that he can identify his own cat. When Padraic sees Sir Roger, an orange cat half-covered in shoe polish, he is disgusted at the imposter and Donny’s suggestion that “cats do change quick” (40). Padraic later says that he shot the cat on the spot because he saw him as unhygienic, but Sir Roger also represents Sir Roger the boy-preferring revolutionary, who was (metaphorically) also a cat trying to cover himself in shoe polish to blend in with the others. When the presumably real Wee Thomas wanders in at the end, Donny and Davey assume that he was out “chasing fecking skirt” (68), assigning human ideas of heterosexuality to the mating instincts of cats. Wee Thomas is also played by a real cat, which means that his actions aren’t fully predictable. He may or may not eat the Frosties in the final scene, so the end of the play is also in flux.

The play also implicates the audience in the prioritization of animals over humans, exploiting the way media representations of animal deaths are heavily sentimentalized to the point that there are websites to check whether an animal dies in a movie. Human death doesn’t receive the same attention. Human violence and death saturate the media, whether stories of real violence or violent fiction. Consumers of media become desensitized because violence is normalized. The play presses hard on an audience’s soft spots for pets, beginning with the opening image of a realistic and gruesome dead cat. As a punchline, Donny picks up the cat, and his brains plop out. If this doesn’t cause a visceral enough reaction, the live cat playing Sir Roger is brought out to invite the rustling excitement and cooing that typically runs through an audience when a real animal comes onstage. But then Padraic, who is such a cat lover that he spares a torture victim for claiming that he has a cat, shockingly and mercilessly shoots the sleeping feline “point blank. It explodes in a ball of blood and bones” (40).

At the end of the play, the image of another live cat staring blankly at the two guns pointed at him is a moment of tension. The audience knows that the playwright is willing to brutalize fictional cats. Instead, Davey and Donny decide to pet and feed him. Choosing pacifism over violence is a relief, and there is finally a free Irish cat who gets to decide how the play ends. Whether or not he eats the Frosties is unchoreographed; it is legitimately random and meaningless, but audiences will try to find meaning in the ending anyway, illustrating the absurdity of searching for meaning and logic in a random world.