Theatre review: The Cripple of Inishmaan, London

DANIEL Radcliffe tends to play outsiders, and his character in The Cripple of Inishmaan is no exception.

Noel Coward Theatre

****

A teenage orphan with a withered arm and a badly bent leg, Billy Claven is relentlessly mocked by other inhabitants of his fishing village.

Radcliffe makes the role his own, mixing vulnerability and a melancholy charm. As he coughs and wheezes, he has to endure the stories of Johnnypateenmike, the local gossip. And he’s besotted with Slippy Helen, a harridan – deliciously played by Sarah Greene – who spits insults at him .

The arrival of an American film director alters Billy’s fortunes, as the prospect of a screen test sends him on an unlikely journey to Hollywood. The experience turns him from a callow boy who stares at cows into a man, fully capable of asserting himself.

While Radcliffe is the production’s big draw, there’s a strong sense of ensemble in Michael Grandage’s polished revival of Martin McDonagh’s mid-Nineties play. Gillian Hanna and Ingrid Craigie have an ideal chemistry as Billy’s adopted aunts. Pat Shortt’s Johnnypateenmike is a gloriously ghastly fund of anecdotes and barbed remarks, and his mother, whom he seems intent on drowning in alcohol, is given a sour fierceness by June Watson.

The lack of romanticism will strike some as bracing, others as heartless. And yet in the end the play seems to give in to the very sentimentality it has held up to ridicule.

Still, there are plenty of laughs – many of them guilty ones – along the way. And Radcliffe’s desire to challenge himself is admirable.