The Lieutenant of Inishmore (Garrick)

No one likes Martin McDonagh's brutal comedy more than the author himself: asked by The Observer to name the best plays of last year, he chose this one, "because it's the only play that counted".

(And, asked to name a turkey, he proceeded to bite the hand that fed him, the RSC - when both the National and Royal Court had unwisely turned this play down - by declaring that the low points of the year were "every other stupid empty f***ing play the RSC did in 2001, and I had to f***ing watch 'em!")

The play, like the man who wrote it, is similarly scabrous and funny and joyfully ambivalent: at once not taking itself too seriously yet deadly serious. It's packed with those paradoxes: a comedy about terrorism, and a critique of violence that is itself remorselessly violent.

Take a Thames Tour of Rotherhithe including the home of London's whaling and timber trades

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