When I went to the box office for The Pillowman, the previous Martin McDonagh play on Broadway, one visitor was making enquiries about tickets and then asked the lady at the ticket window if it was a comedy. It’s a funny question. McDonagh is a supremely comic playwright—he is very imaginative, and his deft feel for dialogue and sense of the surreal keeps the audience in constant laughter. His works are unquestionably comedies, but they are very black comedies that appear to have escaped from some dark absurdist underworld. They are not bathed in the breezy Broadway sunshine an escapism-seeking tourist usually searches for.

McDonagh’s latest Broadway offering is The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Set in a rural island off the West Coast of Ireland, the story concerns “Mad” Padraic, a terrorist who returns home from his activities in Northern Ireland when he is informed that his beloved cat is “poorly.” The cat however is not “poorly,” not “in a coma,” but very definitely dead, a victim of catricide. Inevitably, the stage is set for a bloody revenge. It’s an intriguing choice of subject matter, perhaps the world’s first comedy that fuses terrorism and pet care.

The fact that a human being can be a monster in some regards and yet show great tenderness, in this case towards a cat, is hardly a revelation. Such paradoxes are a predictable part of human nature. Although the central storyline is based on this contradiction in the main character, many other themes are explored. The terrorists get ridiculed: their pettiness, their stupidity, the emptiness and boredom of their lives. There is nothing attractive or glamorous about their existence, and no real explanation of how they ended up in a life of violence. But then violence often begins where thought ends. As the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka noted, one stage of conflict is “I am right; you are wrong” and as bad as this absolutism and lack of doubt can be, even worse is when not even this dialogue exists and the conflict simply descends to “I am right; you are dead.” Perhaps the most interesting idea about violence that is interwoven in the story is the relationship between gender and violence—destruction as the embodiment of an essentially, and almost exclusively, heterosexual male preoccupation.

In addition to the wonderful comic spirit of the work, what is often most memorable is the playwright’s ability to handle the quiet moments between the more dramatic scenes. In the dialogue between the neighbor Davey and Donny (Padriac’s father), the tragicomedy and poetic cadence of ordinary conversation is reminiscent of Beckett. The gory action scenes are less enjoyable—they are sometimes fairly predictable and thus slightly stall the overall momentum of the play. The depiction of violence in these scenes is deliberately extremely over-the-top, a very Quentin Tarantino aesthetic.

What the play lacks compared with McDonagh’s other works such as The Pillowman, is an emotional center; it’s often hard to deeply connect with the main protagonists—leaving the audience somewhat indifferent to these characters’ fate and more engaged with bystander figures such as Davey.

The most noteworthy performances are by David Wilmot who plays “Mad” Padraic with maniacal aplomb, and Domhnall Gleeson who is Davey, convincingly capturing the character’s awkwardness and exasperation.

Overall, an inventive, original, thoughtful, and very humorous satire. In this case, something that “does put tourists off” is just the ticket.

Now playing at the Lyceum Theatre, 149 West 45th Street. Student rush tickets (with ID) available for $26. http://www.inishmoreonbroadway.com/index2.htm