Aidan Turner made his West End debut this month as the unhinged Padraic in Michael Grandage’s revival of Martin McDonagh’s brutal black comedy THE LIEUTENANT OF INNISHMORE at the Noel Coward Theatre. Padraic, turned down by the IRA for being ‘too mad’, and unable to be accommodated by any mainstream terrorist organisations, becomes a lieutenant in the INLA, a Republican paramilitary splinter group.

The Evening Standard’s Henry Hitchings called it, “FATHER TED colliding with RESERVOIR DOGS – or perhaps more appropriately Reservoir Cats.” Audiences first meet Padraic pulling out the the toenails of James, a Belfast drug pusher, chastising him for selling marijuana to good Catholic children as opposed to Protestant children, which he deems marginally acceptable. As he is about to slice James’s right nipple off he gets a call that from home that his beloved cat and only friend for the past 15 years ‘Wee Thomas’ is poorly. He breaks down sobbing and decides to immediately return to Innishmore to see his ailing moggy.

‘Wee Thomas’ is in fact dead, head smashed in, brains squeezed out ‘like toothpaste.’ Padraic seeks violent retribution – a sentimental psychopath’s overweening grief for his pet and indifference to human life – setting the tone for the rest of the play. As Henry Hitchings observes he “plays him, not as some wide-eyed barbarian, but as a man endowed with demented innocence.”

“This is TITUS ANDRONICUS played for laughs,” wrote Michael Billington in the Guardian, who said, “Aidan Turner is terrific in this shocking comedy.” A sentiment shared by all.
I met Aidan on a quiet Thursday afternoon, before the run started, as he was leaving the theatre for a brief break from final preparations. We were able to have a very pleasant, uninterrupted chat as he signed this rehearsal rendering, prior to the POLDARK and HOBBIT hoards descending once the season got underway.