Anish Agrawal October 28, 2011 The Dimensions of Arts Dr.

Grace

The Cripple of Inishmaan

The Cripple of Inishmaan is a dark comedy by Martin McDonagh who links the story to the real life. Set on the small Aran Islands community of Inishmaan off the Western Coast of Ireland, circa 1934, the inhabitants are excited to learn of a Hollywood film crew's arrival in neighboring Inishmore to make a documentary about life on the islands. "Cripple" Billy Claven, eager to escape the gossip, poverty and boredom of Inishmaan, vies for a part in the film, and to everyone's surprise, the orphan and outcast gets his chance. The play tried to personalize the love, rejection, disappointment, betrayal, joy elation, and suffering that we experience in our daily lives. It did it so by using live people acting out situations that very often looked and sounded like real life. The plays mood shifts from light to heavy. Comedy dealt with light or amusing subjects or with serious and profound subjects in a light, familiar or satirical manner. As a consequence, it was more complex than tragedy and more complicated to define precisely. The playwrights language told us at least part of what we can expect from the play. For example, playwright used everyday speech which, we generally expect to resemble everyday truth or reality. This everyday language also brought the characters to life. Playwright also used monologues as a language device to communicate characters inner thoughts to us in the only way possible in the theatre. That is, the characters talked out loud. We could hear them, but none of the other characters on stage at that time could. Our willing suspension of disbelief allowed us to accept

such a device without destroying the reality of the scene before us. I knew I was sitting in a theatre with open people around me, and knew that when the stage lights go up, I will witness an enactment. That enactment is not real-even if the play depicts historical events. Nonetheless, I was able to shed the disbelief of the fictional moment and accept and enter into the emotional understandings of what the play portrayed. In the play, with computerized movements of the lightning instruments, stage lightning played a very important role in presenting reality. The lighting design served for illusion and motivation purpose by creating sunlight, lamplight, moonlight, and other sources of light, which helped us, experience the time and place of the action. The stage and the lightning helped to determine the nature of the plot: how it moves from one moment to another and how the experience ultimately comes to an end. Plot is the structure of the play, the skeleton that gives the play shape, and on which the other elements hang. Character is the psychological motivation of the people in the play. I tried to focus on why individuals do what they do, how they change, and how they interact with other individuals as the plot unfolded. I noticed there were some scenes which were forced in and were not playing any role to build the plot and so it felt like the plot was so de-emphasized that it virtually disappeared. The process of coming to the conclusion about the theme involved several layers of interpretation. Loneliness, anger, and the way not belonging were manifested in human behavior.