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by Maureen Murphy
McDonagh photograph by Simon Annand
Is the author of the Leenane trilogy the unwilling heir to Irish tradition?
Martin McDonagh says he rarely goes to the theatre, contends that he writes plays only to make the money to produce his own films, and claims to know little about the work of the great Irish playwrights like John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, and Samuel Beckett. Scholars and critics, however, suspect otherwise. They have nonetheless identified the influence of Synge and Beckett in his work and continue to hail him as the latest in a distinguished line of Irish dramatists and writers. Newsweek’s Jack Kroll even called McDonagh "the prodigy of the western world" in a tongue-in-cheek reference to his canny relationship to his predecessors.
McDonagh, who has said that he wants "to write plays that shake you up a little bit," is frequently compared to John Millington Synge, whose explosive 1907 play The Playboy of the Western World shook up quite a lot. Synge’s protagonist, the young Christy Mahon, believes he has killed his father with the blow of a spade. He is celebrated as a hero by the people in a village in the west of Mayo—until his father returns, still very much alive. In an effort to make good his boast, Christy tries to finish him off. His horrified admirers then turn on him, proclaiming that "There is a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed."
When The Playboy of the Western World premiered in Dublin it was condemned by nationalists, who thought the play showed the Irish as gullible and feckless at a time when they were pressing for Home Rule. The audience rioted on opening night. But the controversy didn’t end there; the Abbey Theatre’s 1911 American tour brought a new round of battles. The Irish in America, concerned about their hard-won respectability, saw The Playboy as a mockery. At the company’s performance in New York the audience threw watches and potatoes; in Philadelphia the company was arrested for indecency and had to be rescued by John Quinn, a New York lawyer and patron of the arts.
If Synge’s play is the gallous story, McDonagh’s is the dirty deed. The Playboy of the Western World is about the boast of a murder; A Skull in Connemara is about the suspicion of murder haunting a guilty husband. Officially, Oona Dowd’s death (before McDonagh’s play begins) was caused by a car accident with her drunken husband Mick at the wheel, but people suspect the accident was staged and that she was bludgeoned to death. Mick is a gravedigger who exhumes corpses to make space for new bodies. His loony anti-social helper Mairtin Hanlon regards digging up bodies and smashing skulls as good fun. When they exhume the section of the graveyard where Mick’s wife is buried, the plot takes a bizarre turn and McDonagh spins far beyond the ending Synge used in his play.
A Skull In Connemara subverts traditional romantic attitudes toward the west of Ireland with portrayals of the mean-spiritedness and petty jealousies below the surface of rural Irish life — which even reach beyond the grave.
McDonagh’s Ireland is the Connemara of his parents’ generation: a beautiful, barren region of mountain, sea and bog, where unemployment and poverty caused high emigration in the 1960s. McDonagh’s parents went to London, where the playwright was born in 1970. McDonagh knows Ireland primarily from holiday visits and recollected conversations with his Connemara relatives, and says his characters speak in the voices of his uncles. The dramatist dropped out of high school and spent several years living on the dole and watching soap operas and soccer on television, eventually writing television scripts before turning to the theatre as a step toward writing and producing his own films. (Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Orson Welles, and John Woo are his favorite directors.) David Mamet’s 1977 play American Buffalo also influenced his early work before he found his voice in the Connemara of his boyhood.
In 1994 McDonagh submitted his play The Beauty Queen of Leenane to Garry Hynes, artistic director of the acclaimed Druid Theatre in Galway. Hynes had confidence in the young unknown dramatist and accepted the play, which opened to rave reviews in 1995, moving to London in 1996 and to New York in 1998 (where it won four Tony awards). McDonagh followed that success with The Lonesome West in 1996 and completed the Leenane trilogy with A Skull in Connemara in 1997. (Leenane is a small village in a lonely spot at the head of a long Connemara fjord.)
A Skull in Connemara takes its title from Beckett’s landmark 1953 drama Waiting for Godot. In the last lines of Lucky’s long quasi-nonsense speech at the end of Act I, he declaims "...I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara." In Beckett the "skull in Connemara" suggests a remote point in the landscape; in McDonagh it refers to the unfinished business of Oona Dowd’s death.
In addition to McDonagh’s debts to Synge and Beckett, the contemporary Irish playwright Tom Murphy may have had a more direct influence. Certainly Hynes may have been predisposed to The Beauty Queen of Leenane because of the Druid’s success with Murphy’s 1985 play Bailegangaire (Town Without Laughter), featuring the late Siobháin McKenna in the role of the matriarch Mammo—a tour-de-force and her last role. The plays share a penchant for dysfunctional relationships and dark comedy, and surely Hynes knew that a company capable of performing Murphy’s play could also give McDonagh’s work a brilliant production. (Both plays were triumphs for the Druid.)
Kevin Tighe, Christopher Evan Welch and Christopher Carley in A Skull In Connemara. |
A Skull in Connemara also has much in common with Maírtín O’Cadháin’s Cré na Cille (Churchyard Clay), a 1949 novel set among the dead in a Connemara cemetery—where the deceased natter about life and question each new arrival about the goings-on in the world above. Whereas McDonagh’s dialogue is comic in its repetitions and banalities, O’Cadháin’s characters speak in the richly nuanced local Irish dialect from a generation ago. Yet both works subvert traditional romantic attitudes toward the west of Ireland with portrayals of the mean-spiritedness and petty jealousies below the surface of rural Irish life—which even reach beyond the grave.
Martin McDonagh may not see himself as part of this tradition of distinguished playwrights and writers, but Irish drama has certainly found him—and made him prodigy of the western world.
Maureen Murphy is Professor of Secondary Education/English at Hofstra University.
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