Aidan Turner spends much of the proceedings stripped down to his vest. This may be partly an allusion to how much we see of his ripped torso in TV’s Poldark. As it happens, though, the torso we see most of is ripped apart for easy disposal, with grobbly bits falling out of the hole. Martin McDonagh’s 2001 play is, in my opinion, the darkest and funniest he has ever written.

It centres on Mad Padraic, a psychopathic INLA paramilitary who returns to his native island in the Aran group on hearing that his best friend, Wee Thomas the cat, is unwell; in fact, Wee Thomas has been battered to death by Padraic’s fellows to lure him where he can be decommissioned from the armed struggle, with extreme prejudice. Padraic’s father, a dim young neighbour and his sister who blinds cows with a BB gun as a political statement all get pulled into this gory rural maelstrom with echoes of Tarantino, Synge and Carl Hiaasen. In short, we’re a world away from McDonagh’s more recent setting of Ebbing, Missouri.

Michael Grandage’s direction enjoys the Oirishry of the writing – “Them corpses won’t be chopping themselves up” – and also does diligent service to its bloody parody of The Playboy Of The Western World, with a backwater community casually accommodating perpetrators of atrocities. Turner enjoys the switchback insanity of Padraic, cuddling his dead cat and dispassionately talking about killing his own father. Charlie Murphy’s Mairead combines girlish romanticism with a taste for blood, and Will Irvine as the INLA commander has the air of someone who would be chilling anywhere else but is simply out of his depth here. But it is Denis Conway and Chris Walley (in his professional début, making fine use of an adolescent yodel in his voice) that drive matters, and drive them into a blood-spattered cottage wall, with verve and aplomb.

When the play premièred, we were barely past the Good Friday Agreement but already the Troubles seemed largely in the past; now, the world is so changed that this tale in which Padraic tortures a cannabis dealer opens the week after Ireland’s Taoiseach publicly contemplated legalising the stuff.

Written for the Financial Times.