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.
Daniel Radcliffe is out to prove something, and he's doing a bang-up job of it. Set for life as the #1 Harry Potter alumnus, he could undoubtedly make a career of movie romcoms. He absolutely refuses, and now after giving his all--and showing it, too--inEquus and singing and dancing on Broadway in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, he's taken on the physically punishing eponymous role in The Cripple of Inishmaan, Martin McDonagh's hilarious, heart-shattering 1997 dramedy.
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