The Lieutenant of Inishmore, The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon

It's a dog's life being a cat in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Martin McDonagh's hilarious new play, premièred by the RSC. At the start, the corpse of a black moggy, its brains spilling out on to the kitchen table, is being worriedly examined by two Inishmore dwellers whose quotient of grey matter is not significantly higher. They have good cause to be anxious. This flattened feline is (or rather, was) the adored pet of mad Padraic (David Wilmot), an INLA fanatic turned down by the IRA for being too dangerous. He'll want to know the precise circumstances of "Wee Thomas"'s demise when he gets back from a spree of torturing and chip-shop bombing in Northern Ireland. His feckless father, Donny (Trevor Cooper) is only too happy to dump the blame on Owen Sharpe's beleaguered teenager, Davey, who claims to have cycled up to, but not over, the animal. But what if this were a political killing posing as an accident?

McDonagh made his name in the Nineties with The Beauty Queen of Leenane and a trilogy about life in rural Ireland that felt like an unholy and impenitent collaboration by Quentin Tarantino and John Millington Synge. Previously, I've had my doubts about this mix. The repro "Oirish" dialogue was unfailingly funny; the farcically callous and violent twists of plot were expertly engineered. But there seemed to be an inhuman absence of any emotional investment from this author in his creations. The situation hasn't really changed here: it's just that, in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, McDonagh trains his trademark techniques on a target that fully deserves them. The play and Wilson Milam's perfectly pitched production escalate into a splatter-fest in which, after a shoot-out, three corpses are sawn to pieces on a blood-washed stage. But the show never loses its exhilaration, because method and message are so adroitly united.

In the person of a man who can break off from torturing a chain-suspended victim to have a fretful mobile phone conversation about the health of his cat, McDonagh makes mock of the psychotic sentimentality of Irish nationalist terrorism. There's some nifty satire, too, of the twisted logic whereby so-called freedom fighters justify their sources of funding. Padraic's moral stand against drug-dealersis inconvenient for a rival group within the INLA, as the pushers finance all their ferry crossings and chip-shop bombings. "That's what Padraic doesn't understand," declares one opponent, "it isn't only for the schoolkids and the oul fellas and the babes unborn we're out freeing Ireland. No. It's for the junkies, the thieves and the drug pushers, too!" Oh, so that's alright, then.

There is an absurd charm about much of this piece. There are delightful shades of Just William to Donny and Davey's hapless scheme of blacking up a substitute ginger cat with shoe polish ("he has a disease makes him go orangey, Padraic"). But the charm is a calculated trap, like the "surprise" ending, which demonstrates that all the violence was absolutely pointless. The Royal Court and the RNT apparently turned this piece down. Their loss, for it's the cat's whiskers.

Paul Taylor

To 12 October (01789 403403)