Character Reversal In Cripple Billy

Martin McDonagh continuously rips at your heart strings. Over and over, he added a little twist that completely destroyed what you thought you knew and replaced it with a new truth. More than once, he takes a character he spent the entire play developing and changes the audience’s opinion in the matter of one line of either dialogue or even stage directions. Although it’s a comedy it still has many moments that make you want to cry. At least four characters throughout the play experience some sort of major character reversal.
Helen is one of a few of Martin McDonagh’s characters who experiences a personality turnabout. From her first line, her violent and bitchy tendencies are utterly on display. Time and time again we see how abrasive and cruel she is. She even blatantly says how she kicks her boss randomly because she feels like he needs to be kicked. So when Cripple Billy admits to fancying her, it is not shocking that she literally laughs in his face and walks away. But a few pages of dialogue later, she …show more content…
Throughout the majority of the play the audience as well as many of the characters believe that Cripple Billy suffers from TB. They think this because f a note believed to have been written by the doctor. Then when Billy returns from America we learn that he forged the letter and he was never really dying of TB. This first reversal is both unexpected and happy; a main character, who McDonagh spends the whole cultivating sympathy for, is no longer suffering from a fatal illness. But this joy is short lived because a few pages later the doctor comes to bandage Billy and after talking with him the rug is pulled out from under both Billy and the audience once again. This happens when the doctor reveals that he suspects Billy is in fact suffering from TB. But this is not the most shocking plot twist in the entire