The Theatre of Martin McDonagh

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Bernadette Reynolds who worked as editorial assistant on this project. Thanks to Barbara Brown for her expert advice and skilled proofing of the document, and to Sunali Munshi for her work on production research. Thanks to Patrick Lonergan for his invaluable advice and support on this book. Thanks also to Michelle Corcoran and Garry Hynes at Druid Theatre Company for their help. We wish to acknowledge the following journals for permission to republish work: Irish University Review, Modern Drama, New Theatre Quarterly, Irish Studies Review, Working Papers Irish Studies, Yearbook in English Studies, Contemporary Theatre Review, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies. Thanks to The Guardian, Observer, The Irish Times, New York Times, irish theatre magazine, and Variety for permission to reprint reviews and comments. To Methuen and Faber & Faber for permission to quote from the published texts. Thanks to Martin McDonagh and to the Rod Hall Agency for permission to use the cover photo. Most of all, we would like to thank Dan Farrelly for his unstinting work as General Editor of Carysfort Press.

Introduction: The Critical Debate

Like anything that is novel, different, challenging, irreverent, apparently prejudicial, uncompromising, or difficult to place, the theatre work of Martin McDonagh has come in for very diverse responses. Sometimes the criticism is overwhelming, appreciative and respectful, almost awe. Such respondents regard the work as adventurous, and as a celebratory and dialogical fusion of old and new. For them, there is a conscious reminder and reiteration of forms, characters, language, locations, and realities that are nebulously and indefinably familiar, onto which something strange, uncanny and atypical is superimposed. This feat appears to unsettle the gaze of the spectator and to make easy emotion, sentiment, and analysis somewhat problematic.

In a sense, Garry Hynes, the Artistic Director of Druid Theatre in Galway, 'discovered' McDonagh. And it was The Beauty Queen of Leenane which kick-started his career in 1996. He had then a series of successes with The Cripple of Inishmaan (1997), The Lonesome West (1997), and A Skull in Connemara (1997). At one point in that year he had four plays running in London, a major achievement for a relatively new playwright. Apart from The Pillowman (2003) the West of Ireland is the locale for all of the work performed to date: Leenane for The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Lonesome West and A Skull in Connemara and the Aran Islands, Inishmaan and Inishmore for The Cripple of Inishmaan (1997) and The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001) respectively. The Oscar-winning live action short film Six Shooter (2005) is set in Ireland, but has no named locale.

Over the past few years McDonagh has refused almost all requests for public interviews, and previous comments that he has made about either the Irish tradition or his own exposure to theatre writing generally can be taken almost with a grain of salt. Too much trust has been placed in his statements, and too much opportunistic exploitation has ensued. Reliable or not, his own general comments, on what plays he had read/ seen before he began to write, and on who are his influences, seem to feed a certain distrust of his motives. We can add to this his general unwillingness to mouth platitudes about those playwrights who have gone before him, which does not seem to be abiding by the usual rules of the game; instead he calls them ugly and second rate. Most upcoming playwrights pay due deference to their traditions at least in public; McDonagh's reported disrespect seems more to be schooled by the Gallagher brothers, Liam and Noel, of Oasis fame, who gained significant PR thanks to their notorious antics and vocalised disrespect. By generating sensation, infamy, and good copy, McDonagh feeds the celebrity mill. His reported altercation with the actor, Sean Connery, at the Evening Standard Awards gained certain notoriety in the tabloid press. At times, one gets the feeling that all McDonagh needs to do is to appear on some reality television show – I'm A Celebrity Get me Out of Here! or Celebrity Love Island – for many of the biases about him to be absolutely confirmed in some peoples' minds.

In this volume we have not only gathered some of the best criticism already published on McDonagh, but we have also sought new work from a variety of individuals, which engages with some, but not all of the previously published analysis. Far too often, volumes of critical analysis all sing more or less off the same hymn sheet. Unlike the writings on much of contemporary theatre practices, these writers seem to be full-bodied and full-blooded in their approaches, less wary and less circumspect than is the norm. Still, despite the open intent, as in theatrical dialogue, what is said often masks the unsaid, thus subtextual readings and systematic consideration of structures of belief and ideology of both plays and criticism is well founded. Hopefully the insistent dialogue between these articles opens up the debate, and gives consideration to multiple, often conflicting, and self-contradictory points of view. As theatre performances require cultural, dramaturgical, translation, production, and audience reception contexts, both the theatre and the academic critic offer not only evaluative frameworks and contextualizations, but they also function as gatekeepers. Yet in the strident efforts to praise and claim, damn and rebuff, there is the persistent drive for myth-making that has long haunted theatre practices. And it is not only writers who are out to mould their own myths.

For the collection, we have also decided to re-publish a series of reviews of plays in performance and articles that deal with the productions and reception of McDonagh's work in Hungary, Australia, Flanders/ Holland, and Turkey. They are not offered as some complete overview, but to provide some snapshot or insight into how the plays are considered, produced and received internationally. It is vital to see not only the potential of scripts to operate in different contexts, but also to be produced in a variety of different ways, especially those that jeopardize the staging and sensibilities of the original productions.

Playwrights cannot control meaning and cannot control production choices, apart from agents granting licenses to perform. Fundamentally, despite intentionalities, the reception of the work is always up for grabs globally. It is important to recognize the impact of globalization itself and the piggybacking that McDonagh's plays seem to do on the back of this phenomenon. Many productions of McDonagh's work will invariably misconstrue things, make unwarranted assumptions, and will project values, aspirations and identities that may not be apposite reflections of space, language, character and action. Yet, the sense of getting it 'wrong' is problematic in its own right. Every act of translation is one of mistranslation, and every production is a supplement and unfaithful in many ways to the published text. Yet, in finding a new context, scripts can be liberated from other types of constraints. So the vaunted Irish dimension is far more complex in reality. Yet it is necessary to be reminded constantly that McDonagh's plays are performed and regarded internationally, not just as representative of the Irish tradition, but as indicative of new British or European trends. Funding of the arts and commerical and subsidised realities are the ultimate contexts through which we must view the work.

On first viewing/ reading, the characters in the plays speak in what could be regarded as a hybrid Hiberno-English. Many critics in this volume investigate McDonagh's use of language from many different perspectives. As with language, critics are divided on the characterizations that McDonagh presents across the body of the work. The characters are regularly regarded as caricatures, puppet-like, adult children without depth. McDonagh is frequently accused of pandering to old colonial stereotypes of Irishness. Often there is a casual homophobia and naturalized racism in what the characters express. Most of it is grounded in fear and not in the experience of contact between those of different sexual orientations, genders, or races. McDonagh's characters are not rampantly sexual, but operate from a celibate reality or a childlike dysfunctional take on sexual relationships. The world of McDonagh's dramas is almost always where intimacy and empathy are in abeyance. Relative poverty is a significant marker.

As with most contemporary plays, questions about gender and agency are raised. McDonagh's plays are open to that scrutiny. Across genders, agency is a complex notion. Obviously, one can test the dramatic action of play to see if the women characters have access to similar types of behaviour, thoughts, and feelings as those of their male counterparts, or if not, analogous access to a wide array of simple, complex, and comparable emotions, whether there are isolations, immobility, exclusions, or the absence of restraints on agency. Clearly, there are gender expectations in the work of McDonagh. The actions of the characters seem to be motivated without real depth, desire or longing. That way, it is the incidental which paves the way for the catastrophic. In the main, they are characters that are invoking the games of children into their adult lives; murder is just child's play, the violence of the fairy tale or nursery rhyme given licence in the world of the characters. What complicates characterization is that there is irreverence, simultaneity, and ambivalence as to motive. The plays are a motive monger's nightmare.

If, as Katurian passionately believes, in The Pillowman, The only duty of a storyteller is to tell a story', then Martin McDonagh has told us a variety of 'savage stories' which have a life of their own.