LONDON — Everybody in the village thinks it’s a hoot that the lad known as Cripple Billy dreams of becoming a movie star. Even his doting aunts agree that any girl who would consider kissing Billy would have to be both blind and backward. They regularly go through fond but ruthless checklists of what makes their nephew so unprepossessing, which includes not just his gnarled body but his face, his eyes and his personality. It says much about the spell cast by Michael Grandage’s revival of “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” which opened recently at the Noel Coward Theater, that these inventories provoke no self-conscious laughter in the audience, the kind that says, “Ho ho, we know better,...
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