Direct from a smash hit London run, Daniel Radcliffe takes on his most critically acclaimed role yet in THE CRIPPLE OF INISHMAAN—the biting comedy by the master of vicious fun, Academy Award winner Martin McDonagh (The Pillowman, In Bruges), and directed by Tony Award winner Michael Grandage (Red, Frost/Nixon).
When a Hollywood director visits a remote Irish island to cast his latest film, the locals clamor for their once-in-a-lifetime chance at movie stardom. But it's Billy, a frail young man with the odds stacked against him, who has the biggest Hollywood dream of them all.
As endearing as Radcliffe makes Billy, McDonagh's play really belongs to the women who co-star as his 'pretend' aunties, and Craigie and Hanna hang on to their adopted nephew like two determined barnacles. Under Grandage's direction, these two actresses take McDonagh's penchant for rustic cuteness - people who talk to stones, gossip about the cows - and make it sing with genuine humor. Less credible is the play's two big revelations, about the cause of Billy's physical impairment, which feel stuck onto the ending. And it wouldn't be a McDonagh play without some hilarious and/or ghastly episode of physical destruction. Here, the egg-smashing scene between Helen and her brother (Conor MacNeill) emerges as an unfunny overreach that, while lacking any blood, is a Grand Guignol display signifying not much of anything and, no doubt, a big mess to clean up after the curtain drops.
But the star in question, Daniel Radcliffe, isn't here just to flex his charisma for fans. In the title role of this glimmeringly dark comedy from 1996, Mr. Radcliffe - the boy wizard in the immensely successful Harry Potter movie franchise - is entirely convincing as the boy who is regarded as least likely to succeed at pretty much anything in his God-forsaken rural Irish town...Compared with most of Mr. McDonagh's work, Cripple has a fairly low violence quotient. It's more comfortably a comedy than, say, Beauty Queen. But as outrageously funny as it often is, the play aches with a subliminal sadness that stays with you. The fabrications and speculations that these characters spin, in the fine old tradition of wild Irish yarns, come from an awareness that life is short and dangerous and, perhaps worst of all, empty...This gorgeously realized production has the wisdom to let us laugh until it hurts.
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