In this article from 1998, Joseph Feeney SJ explores the origins and rise of Martin McDonagh, one of modern Ireland’s most successful playwrights.
Joseph Feeney SJ was professor of English Literature at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia for over 40 years, later becoming Professor emeritus of English and adjunct professor at SJU. He passed away in 2023. Further information on his life and work can be found at his memorial page.
Joseph Feeney, ‘Martin McDonagh: Dramatist of the West’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 87, No. 345 (Spring, 1998), 24 – 32. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30091859
———
Though London-born, Martin McDonagh is thoroughly Irish in his plays about Connemara and the Aran Islands. He is also talented and precocious: in the summer of 1997, at the age of 27, he had four plays running in London’s West End. In The Leenane Trilogy at the Royal Court Theatre and The Cripple of Inishmaan at the National Theatre he showed himself a darkly funny storyteller and a smooth dramatic craftsman with postmodern leanings.
He has won praise in both Ireland and Britain. The Irish Times celebrated the ‘rapturous standing ovation’ after the Galway premiere of The Leenane Trilogy, calling the performances ‘undoubtedly one of the great events of the contemporary Irish theatre’. The Irish Independent hailed the ‘privileged premiere’ of ‘this glorious trilogy’ before a ‘zealous audience’ alternately ‘recoiling with horror or overcome with hysterical laughter’. London critics were similarly impressed. The Guardian noted his ‘endless capacity for surprise’ in the Trilogy as he combines ‘a love of traditional story-telling with the savage ironic humour of the modem generation’, and The Daily Telegraph called him ‘a prodigiously gifted writer’.
The Times found The Cripple of Inishmaan a ‘wonderfully funny, troubling play’ and its author ‘a born storyteller with a precocious sense of dramatic structure’. ‘When you feel he is getting sentimental’, it continued, ‘he hits you with a corrective shock’ and finally produces ‘exhilaration at a tough, boisterous, gifted play’. A few critics disagreed: The Independent thought the Leenane plays ‘decline into high-energy repetitive cartoon’, The Financial Times called his talent ‘old-fashioned’, his satire ‘soppy’, and his Ireland (in The Cripple) ‘more artificial, more sentimental, more silly, more slow, more melodramatic, and light-years more cute’ than the real Ireland. Yet even The Financial Times, after criticizing ‘the meanness of his mind’ in the Trilogy and calling him ‘the Quentin Tarentino of the Emerald Isle’ as well as ‘cute, melodramatic and manipulative’, still added, ‘He has craft, nerve, humour, suspense, charm, he is actor-friendly and he can play the audience like a fiddle’, Who is this young playwright that evokes such responses?
Born in South London’s Elephant and Castle area, Martin McDonagh is the son of a Connemara father and a Sligo mother. Leaving school as soon as he could at sixteen, he supported himself with part-time jobs – ‘the odd spell in an office and a supermarket’ 10 – so he could spend time watching films and television, and reading and writing voraciously. Unsuccessful with film scripts, he tried short stories, then radio plays, then had the BBC reject twenty-two of his radio plays – ‘six in one day, once’ 11. He tried TV scripts with no success and finally turned to plays. Meanwhile, when his parents moved back to Ireland in the early nineties, he stayed in London with his older brother John, a novelist and screen-writer, in the family house in Camberwell, South London.
Born in South London’s Elephant and Castle area, Martin McDonagh is the son of a Connemara father and a Sligo mother. Leaving school as soon as he could at sixteen, he supported himself with part-time jobs – ‘the odd spell in an office and a supermarket’ – so he could spend time watching films and television, and reading and writing voraciously. Unsuccessful with film scripts, he tried short stories, then radio plays, then had the BBC reject twenty-two of his radio plays – ‘six in one day, once’. He tried TV scripts with no success and finally turned to plays. Meanwhile, when his parents moved back to Ireland in the early nineties, he stayed in London with his older brother John, a novelist and screen-writer, in the family house in Camberwell, South London.
McDonagh became a playwright by chance: ‘I only started writing plays because I had been rejected everywhere else. It was the only literary art form left. I knew I didn’t want to write novels because I knew I didn’t have the prose style. Whereas I thought with stage plays that there was a lot less to get a handle on. I still think films are very hard. I think stage plays are one of the easiest art forms. Just get the dialect, a bit of a story and a couple of nice characters, and you’re away’. His perspective as an outsider also helped, according to his Irish director Garry Hynes: ‘The Ireland he encounters provokes his imagination. So he does not just recreate some sort of observed reality – there’s a chemistry that takes place and he creates an imagined world’.
McDonagh first saw success in 1996 with The Beauty Queen of Leenane, co-produced by Galway’s Druid Theatre Company and London’s Royal Court Theatre, and directed by Garry Hynes, the Druid’s head. It had its first performance at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, on 1 February 1996, and opened at London’s Royal Court Theatre Upstairs on 29 February 1996. By December it had won three major London awards: the George Devine Award for Most Promising Newcomer, the Writers’ Guild Award for Best Fringe Theatre Play, and the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright. McDonagh’s second production was The Cripple of Inishmaan, written during his year as Writer-in-Residence at London’s Royal National Theatre and accepted overnight by the NTs head, Richard Eyre…Then came The Leenane Trilogy – The Beauty Queen of Leenane complemented by A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West.
As an Englishman born of Irish parents, McDonagh is an outsider who has visited Ireland only on holidays. He doesn’t know whether he’s English or Irish – ‘I’m not very keen on roots’ – and for the language of his plays he ‘sort of remembered the way my uncles spoke back in Galway’. His plots and characters seem more intuitive than experienced, and he sketches an Ireland that is dark, secular, and very funny.
McDonagh’s Connemara is home to angry, disconnected people whose ‘reality…is murder, self-slaughter, spite, ignorance and familial hatred’. In The Beauty Queen, Maureen Folan, a lonely woman in her early forties, finds love for the first time, hopes to marry and go to Boston, but is thwarted by her manipulative mother, with violent consequences. In A Skull in Connemara, Mick Dowd, suspected of murdering his wife, is hired by the parish priest to move bodies in the cemetery, finds his wife’s body missing, batters skulls and bones in a drunken (and funny) scene, and faces another possible murder. In The Lonesome West, the feuding brothers Valene and Coleman Connor, stuck together in a small cottage after their father’s death (or murder), grow violent over minor matters, reject Fr Welsh’s plea for peace, and after a short reconciliation renew their mutual hatred. And in The Cripple of Inishmaan, there is in the Aran Islands a 90-year-old alcoholic mother, a son who is killing her with alcohol, a widow who talks to a stone, a girl who throws eggs at people, and the tubercular Billy Claven (everyone calls him Cripple Billy) who wants a role in the film Man of Aran (1934), fails a screen test in Hollywood, and returns with futile hope of romance on Inishmaan…Some of McDonagh’s characters are warm and kind, even gentle and heroic…Yet many of McDonagh’s people remain angry, desperate, unforgiving, and woeful in their personal relationships.
McDonagh is a secular man of the nineties, and his West is no longer the fabled land of whimsical gaiety and firm belief…Connemara no longer is a place of deep faith; rather, Leenane’s ‘older priests go punching you in the head’. Inishmaan’s Fr Barratt fondles his choirgirls. Even young Fr Welsh, driven to alcohol by his people and giving his life to save the feuding Connor brothers, thinks ‘God has no jurisdiction’ in Leenane…Yet the audience laughs, for McDonagh is funny…Such comedy is possible because, as the Irish Times puts it, ‘the Ireland of these plays is one in which all authority has collapsed’. Nor does McDonagh have strong personal commitments in religion or politics. In the past he felt ‘only slightly’ Catholic and ‘now I’m definitely not Catholic’. His plays ignore politics and social issues: ‘I’m not into any kind of definition, any kind of -ism, politically, socially, religiously, all that stuff. Besides; ‘I’ve come to a place where the ambiguities are more interesting than choosing a strict path and following it’. His Ireland is an Ireland of ambiguities.
[McDonagh has] little enough interest in literature or drama. ‘I doubt I’ve seen 20 plays in my life’, McDonagh said after the 1996 success of The Beauty Queen. ‘I prefer films. I only started writing for the theatre when all else failed. Basically, it was just a way of avoiding work and earning a bit of money’. Even more, ‘I’m coming to theatre with a disrespect for it. I’m coming from a film fan’s perspective on theatre’. The few plays he had seen were linked with the cinema: ‘Theatre bored the socks off me. I only ever went to see film stars, Martin Sheen or Tim Roth. The best was probably David Mamet’s American Buffalo with Al Pacino’. Nor does McDonagh bow to the past; he is a playwright whose ‘idea of theatre is some kind of punk destruction of what’s gone on before, kind of like what the Pogues did to classical Irish music. But, at the same time, to have respect for the decent things that have gone before’.
Whatever his attitudes, he learned his craft well. ‘I write very quickly’, he says, ‘and a lot of the time it’s like copying down a conversation between two people in my head’. For him, such speed is an advantage, for ‘I don’t give myself time to hide anything’. And he is disciplined: ‘I usually try to write a set number of pages each day, probably not more than three or four hours a day, which isn’t an awful lot. But I try to do it every single day. Beauty Queen, I think, took just over a week. That’s very fast, but it didn’t seem that way. There’s eight or nine scenes, so if you write one scene a day, which I did, it wasn’t too hard’. And he expects results: ‘People should leave a theatre with the same feeling that you get after a really good rock concert. You don’t want to talk about it, you just let it buzz into you. I can’t stand people analysing things. A play should be a thrill like a fantastic rollercoaster’.
Though McDonagh speaks with a South London accent – ‘a sarf London accent’, notes one interviewer – he finds the language of Ireland a key to his creativity: ‘In Connemara and Galway, the natural dialogue style is to invert sentences and use strange inflections. Of course, my stuff is a heightening of that, but there is a core strangeness of speech, especially in Galway’. ‘My father’s first language was Gaelic, not English’, he says, ‘and there is something about that stylised way of talking that appeals to me’. When he recalls his uncles talking, he fixes on ‘the structure of their sentences. I didn’t think of it as structure, just as kind of rhythm in the speech. And that seemed an interesting way to go, to try to do something with that language that wouldn’t be English or American’.
He learned well: the language of his plays is as Irish and lilting as J.M. Synge’s – and equally artificial. ‘Was it a barn with a wide open door you were born in’, says one character, adding a bit later, ‘A pack of not very good songs they sing now’. The director Garry Hynes had it right: ‘He’s no more authentic, if you want to use that word, than was Synge, who also mythologised this part of Ireland. It’s the imagination of him that counts’.
…His influences are unusual. Films loom large…As for theatre, he recognizes the influence of David Mamet and Harold Pinter on his first two plays, and in trying to get their American and English voices out of his head he rediscovered Ireland…despite all influences, Richard Eyre, director of the National Theatre, is correct when he said (in a lecture) that McDonagh ‘has sprung from the womb a fully fledged playwright’ so. He has a natural sense of structure: each play is the story of a character or a family, and each story proceeds smoothly to its narrative conclusion. In The Leenane Trilogy McDonagh also weaves the three plays together by the use of running jokes (is the priest’s name Walsh or Welsh?), by the characters’ realistic and salty language, by the suite-like order of the plays (slow movements separated by a scherzo), and by mentioning in one play characters who appear in another. After all, Leenane is a very small town.
It is not easy, though, to describe McDonagh’s unique voice as he oscillates between shock and laughter…critics disagree about his voice. Some see a playwright whose ‘tricks and turns have a purpose…[as] bridges over a deep pit of sympathy and sorrow, illuminated by a tragic vision of stunted and frustrated lives’. Others find his plays ‘gleeful but joyless’, ‘cute’ ‘two-dimensional’, ‘old-fashioned’…He has also been called ‘as cute as the Ireland he tries to satirise’ and ‘the Quentin Tarentino of the Emerald Isle’. Does McDonagh’s talent, then, have any defining factors? The solution lies in recognizing the three voices which characterize the playwright. McDonagh manages a highly personal – perhaps unique – blend of three styles: the mythic realism of Synge, the flashy violence of Tarantino’s iconic film Pulp Fiction (1994), and an unstable postmodemism also found in Tarantino. Synge appears in his language, settings, rural characters, stunted lives, sympathetic pespective, and love of storytelling. Tarantino is seen in the gunshots, bludgeonings, car-accidents, suicides, self-mutilation, bloody shirts, bashed skulls and bones, microwave-baking of a hamster, even Slippy Helen’s aggressive egg-throwing. Many of these events, like the back-seat shooting in Pulp Fiction, are at once very funny and very shocking.
This mixture – Synge’s mythic realism, Tarantino’s violence, and a partial postmodemism – explains what critics describe as ‘the savage ironic humour of the modem generation’, ‘cartoon creatures who really die when someone fires a shotgun at their heads’, and ‘an utterly nineties sensibility, in which knowing and playful pastiche becomes indistinguishable from serious and sober intent’. It explains why his plays are ‘both pre-modem and post-modern…. [where] the fifties are laid over the nineties, giving the play’s apparent realism the ghostly, dizzying feel ofa superimposed photograph’.
McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy and The Cripple of Inishmaan offer a volatile mix of Irish country life, human poignancy, drastic violence, pealing laughs, emotional engagement, and post-modern instability. Such is the stage-signature of a highly gifted young dramatist with a distinctive voice. His plays have a place on the international stage.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons